Dictionary.net

(From ASCII and Ebonics) A style of textcommunication in English which is most common on talksystems such as irc. Its notable characteristics are:Typing all in lowercase (and occasionally all in uppercase).Copious use of abbreviations of the sort "u" for "you" "1" for"one" (and therefore "some1" for "someone", "ne1" for"anyone"), "2" for "to", "r" for "are", etc.A general lack of punctuation, except for strings of questionmarks and exclamation marks.Common use of the idiom "m or f?", meant to elicit a statementof the listener's gender.Typical extended discourse in ASCIIbonics: "hey wasup ne1 want2 cyber?" "m or f?"ASCIIbonics is similar to the way B1FF talked, although B1FFused more punctuation (lots more), and used all uppercase,rather than all lowercase. What's more, B1FF was onlyinterested in warez, and so never asked "m or f?".It has been widely observed that some of the purest examplesof ASCIIbonics come from non-native speakers of English.The phenomenon of ASCIIbonics predates by several years theuse of the word "ASCIIbonics", as the word could only havebeen coined in or after late 1996, when "Ebonics" was firstused in the US media to denote the US English dialects knownin the linguistic literature as "Black Vernacular English".