A/S/L

About

A/S/L is an initialism for age/sex/location used to inquire about someone’s profile information in online chat rooms, often with the intention of engaging in cybersex.

Origin

While the exact origin of the initialism is unknown, the online slang term likely originated with the rise of IRC chat rooms in the 1980s and became widespread through its usage on instant messaging services like AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger in the 1990s. In March 2002, “ASL” was added to the Internet Acronyms Dictionary.^[4]

Spread

On April 3rd, 2004, Urban Dictionary^[2] user TheWiggidy submitted an entry for “asl,” describing the initialism as a means to learn “where you live so they can come to your house with a chainsaw and kill you.” On April 24th, 2006, Urban Dictionary^[1] user PurEvil submitted an entry for “a/s/l”, defining it as "the mating call of the barely post-pubescent teenager (shown below).

During the mid-2000s, conversational usage of “a/s/l” began to wane with the arrival of real-time video chat services, though the term continued to live on through in-game chats in online multiplayer games and anonymous communities like Omegle.

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On April 12th, 2007, the Oxford Handbook of Internet Psychology^[6] was released, which stated that 52% of users in MOO text-based online virtual reality systems included references to age, sex, location or physical appearance. On August 11th, 2009, The Online Slang Dictionary^[3] added an entry for “A/S/L.” On June 14th, 2012, Redditor XtlanZzyzx submitted a screenshot of two Omegle users role-playing as survivors in an A/S/L-themed zombie apocalypse scenario to /r/funny.^[10] The original Imgur post garnered over 1.25 million views in the next three years.

On October 16th, 2014, the /r/GuessTheASL^[8] subreddit was launched, where users submit pictures of personal items as clues for others to guess the age, sex and location. On January 29th, 2015, the novel Age Sex Location by Melissa Pimentel was published by Penguin.^[7] On July 7th, Redditor surprised panda submitted a photograph of a street sign titled “A/S/L?” to /r/funny,^[9] where it gathered uwpards of 3,400 votes (89% upvoted) and 40 comments in the next month (shown below).

14/F/Cali

“14/F/Cali” is a shorthand for identifying oneself as a 14-year-old girl from California, which is used in response to A/S/L. 14/F/Cali is often associated with adult men masquerading as teenage girls in online chatrooms, based off the tongue-in-cheek adage “there are no girls on the Internet”.

Search Interest

Note: The Google Trends graph for the search query “ASL” may be inaccurate due to its alternative usage as the acronym for American Sign Language (ASL).

External References