Laugh inflation
Whether "haha" grows into "hahahahaha" over the life of a relationship — comparing laugh length early on against laugh length later.
A short "lol" and a keyboard-mashing "ahahahahahahaha" can be reacting to equally funny things — the difference is often just how comfortable and expressive two people have become with each other over time. Measuring average laugh length in the first quarter of a chat’s messages against the last quarter (split by message count, not by date, so a chat that was mostly quiet early on isn’t compared unfairly) turns that impression into an actual number: laughs getting longer over time reads as a real, measurable form of escalating comfort.
Example
Average laugh length moving from 5.5 characters early in a chat to 8.4 characters later — a 53.6% increase — is a genuinely measurable sign that laughing together got more expressive over time, not just more frequent.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a "laugh" in the first place?+
Recognizable laugh patterns like "haha", "ahah", "lol", and their common variants — not every mention of something funny, just the specific texted stand-ins for laughter itself.
Does laugh inflation only ever go up?+
No — it can shrink too, and a shrinking number is just as real a signal as a growing one; the measure reports whatever direction the two quarters actually show.
Related terms
- Digital body languageThe tone carried by how a text is sent — reply speed, message length, punctuation, capitalization — separate from what it literally says.
- Top expressions (chat n-grams)The one-, two-, and three-word phrases someone actually uses most — filtered so the answer isn’t just "the" and "a" in every chat.