139 / 308
草 kusa
lol, literally grass.
What does kusa mean?
Japanese laughs online by typing wwww. Line up enough w's and they look like grass sprouting — so grass now means laughing.
Example
その言い訳、草。
That excuse, lol.
Vibe
Who you can say this to, and how it lands.
Friends only Casual. Natural with friends, out of place at work or with strangers.
Culture note
It escalates: a huge grassland means you are absolutely dying of laughter.
The story behind kusa
The chain is short and completely logical. Japanese used to mark laughter in writing with a bracketed character for laugh; online that got trimmed to a single w, and one w was never enough. Strings of them, wwwww, started sprouting at the end of messages, and somebody noticed they looked like grass growing along the baseline.
So the grass became the joke. From gaming chat and message boards in the 2000s, kusa spread until it worked as a standalone noun, a verb and a landscape. Something mildly funny makes grass grow; something genuinely destroying makes a whole prairie. Speak it aloud in real life and you sound charmingly, deliberately online.
Get kusa in your pocket
草 is one of 308 words in YABAI, a Japanese culture snack for Android. Every word comes with its meaning, an example sentence, a vibe check and a story like the one above — in 13 languages, read aloud by your device. Paid app: no ads, no sign-up, no subscription.
