Haha. Lol. Hehe.

There are many ways to express laughter when chatting online...or posting on Facebook. In fact, according to a blog post from the Facebook research team, Facebook has been analysing posts and comments posted on Facebook in order to identify how we express laughter through text as well as emoji.

During the last week of May, about 15 per cent of people included laughter in a post or comment. The most common type of laugh used was "haha", followed by various emoji and "hehe". But the type and length of laughter people used all depended on how old they were, their gender, and where they lived.

New Yorkers, for instance, preferred emoji, and San Franciscans preferred "haha". But the vast majority of people were haha-ers (51.4 per cent, actually) - and that includes "haha", "hahaha", and "hahahaha". Meanwhile, 37 per cent were emoji lovers, 12.7-per cent were hehe-ers, and 1.9-per cent were lol-ers.

The most common variation of "haha" was the four-letter one, though the six-letter one was also common. Haha-ers were also more open than the hehe-ers to using an odd number of letters. Also, men used "haha" and "hehe" more than woman, whereas women tended to use emoji and "lol" more.

Facebook said a single emoji wass used 50 per cent of the time, and it's rare to see more than 5 identical consecutive emoji. As for "lol", it was almost always used by itself but sometimes "lolz" and "loll" were used.

If you want to see these stats in graph or chart-form, Facebook made a bunch of them. We included some in the gallery above. You can also check out Facebook's blog post here.