the.com/laugh
the involuntary bark of joy that hijacks your face before your brain approves it
means To make the spontaneous sounds and facial expressions that signal amusement, delight, or sometimes nervousness.
from From Old English hliehhan, a word built to imitate the sound itself — those breathy, gasping bursts. It shares deep Germanic roots with the German lachen and Dutch lachen, and that stubborn silent 'gh' is the ghost of a throaty consonant our ancestors once actually pronounced, scraped from the back of the mouth like a cough turned happy.
- social glue
- You laugh 30 times more often around others
- contagious
- Hearing a laugh primes your brain to copy it
- rat science
- Rats giggle ultrasonically when tickled
- fatal cases
- Laughter has triggered fainting and heart episodes
- fake tell
- Real laughs spasm; polite ones stay too smooth
laughing gas demonstrations — nitrous oxide used by humphry davy in 1799 public lectures where audiences laughed uncontrollably
laughing kookaburra — australian bird whose call sounds like loud human laughter, iconic to outback soundscapes