Personal advertisement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A personal or personal ad is an item or notice traditionally in the newspaper, similar to a classified ad but personal ^{[disambiguation needed]} in nature. With its rise in popularity, the World Wide Web has also become a common medium for personals, commonly referred to as online dating. Personals are generally meant to generate romance, friendship, or casual (sometimes sexual) encounters, and usually include a basic description of the person posting it, and their interests.

Due to newspaper prices being based on characters or lines of text, a jargon of abbreviations, acronyms and code words arose in personals, and have carried over to the internet.

[edit] Examples of single-letter abbreviations used in three-letter acronyms (TLA)

The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article or discuss the issue on the talk page.

[edit] First letter

The first letter describes the person seeking.

• F: Female
• M: Male (or Man)
• M: Married
• S: Single
• T: Transgender
• W: Woman

[edit] Middle letter

The middle letter represents the ethnicity of the person posting the ad. Can be replaced by 4, standing for for ("seeking", "desires", etc.).

• A: Asian
• B: Black
• H: Hispanic
• J: Jewish or Japanese
• L: Latino or Latina
• W: White

[edit] Last letter

• C: Couple
• F: Female
• M: Male (or Man)
• T: Transgender
• W: Woman

[edit] List of common abbreviations, acronyms, and code words

[edit] References

• http://www.stargazers.com/abbrevad.html
• http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/
• http://www.1-true-love.com/datingtips/abbr.shtml
• http://www.all-acronyms.com/?tg=personals&o=a

[edit] See also

• Contact magazine
• Craigslist
• Gumtree
• Online dating service