Twitch chats are usually full of emotes that you most likely don’t know. Apart from the most famous ones, like Kappa, Trihard, and PogChamp, there’s one emote often seen in heavily-populated chats. That emote is KEKW.
So let’s take a step off of the usual esports guides and take a look at what does KEKW means.
What Does KEKW Mean?
KEKW is an emote that’s part of FrankerFaceZ. The emote depicts a man laughing. There’s, however, a great background story to this widely used emote.
The man in the image is a Spanish comedian and actor, Juan Joya Borja, nicknamed “El Risitas”. Back in 2007, a video named “Las Paelleras” surfaced on the internet.
Jesús Quintero was interviewing Juan on his show “Ratones Coloraos.” The funniest part of the video is when Juan bursts into laughter. As Youtube got more traction, so did this video. But it wasn’t until 2015 that it would turn into a well-known meme.
The video is in Spanish, so people all over the internet started posting subtitles for it. These subtitles were, obviously, fake. But this way, the video turned into a huge meme.
After four years, in the summer of 2019, the emote KEKW was introduced to Twitch, and it quickly became viral compared to other emotes. But what’s the meaning of KEKW, and when does a Twitch chat use it?
Well, KEKW is used when the chat sees something funny. Just like LOL or LUL, the chat usually spams KEKW when they are laughing.
However, the name KEK has a different origin story. If you’re a World Of Warcraft player, you’ll already know this. When you send LOL to a player from the opposing team, instead of LOL, they receive KEK. The W adds some exaggeration, meaning that something is hilarious.
But why is KEKW such a prominent part of most Twitch chats?
Why Is KEKW Relevant?
Well, big Twitch streamers like xQc are the ones to blame for this massive surge of KEKW. The predecessor of KEKW, the LUL emote, was used a lot right before KEKW was introduced.
While most people wondered what KEKW means, streamers started mentioning and using it much more than LUL. They also began adding variations of the KEKW emote as their subscriber emotes.
KEKW has also become much more relevant in the past few months. After the controversy behind the PogChamp emote, and the Kappa emote’s lesser use, KEKW started getting used more in chats.
But if you’re still wondering what KEKW means, we can say that you can use it when you’re laughing hard at something.
You could also use some variants of KEKW, like KEKWOW or KEKWhat, if you see something exciting or confusing, respectively.
Some alternatives to the KEKW emote are OMEGALUL and LULW. And while these two are nice emotes, nothing can beat Risitas’ face when he’s laughing.
So, use the KEKW emote whenever you feel that what you’re watching is funny.