What does KEKW mean? Twitch chat’s favorite emote explained, the origin of KEK

If you’ve spent even five minutes in a Twitch chat, you’ve most likely seen the word ‘KEKW’ or ‘KEK’ thrown around a lot. But what is the meaning behind this emote?

Twitch chat can be a bit of a minefield, and to some extent, it’s like learning a whole new language. Except, instead of words, it’s all small images called emotes.

KEKW specifically has become one of the most widely used emotes on the platform, although many users won’t actually be able to see it, because it requires BTTV or FrankerFaceZ – browser add-ons for Twitch.

Perhaps you find yourself in this boat, but fear not, we will explain everything you need to know about the meaning behind the infamous kek.

What does KEK mean?

To start, the ‘KEK’ portion of the word comes from the game World of Warcraft. In WoW, users in opposing factions would see a cryptic version of chat messages, thus when players in one faction typed ‘LOL’ (laughing out loud), players on the other side would see ‘KEK’.

This took off, and soon KEK just became the de facto replacement for LOL. It then spread outside of WoW game chat, and was used across the web, on Reddit, Twitter, and, of course, Twitch.

What does KEWK meaning on Twitch?

KEKW is simply the message typed in Twitch chat in order to generate the KEKW emote. Users who have BTTV / FrankerFaceZ installed on their browser will see an image of a laughing man.

Specifically, that laughing man is El Risitas, laughing on Spanish TV. It comes from a viral video clip. El Risitas sadly passed away in 2021, but the meme lives on in his honor. As you can now probably guess, the KEKW emote is used to represent laughter.

Although there are plenty of laughing emotes, such as LUL, LULW and OMEGALUL, KEKW is possibly more popular than all of them combined, at least in some channels.

If you’d like to learn about some of these other popular Twitch emotes, we have a handy guide for all the basics you need here.