the.com/laughing
the body's involuntary confession that something just outsmarted your seriousness.
means Producing the spontaneous sounds and movements—the chuckles, giggles, or guffaws—that erupt when something strikes you as funny or joyful.
from From Old English 'hlæhhan' (to laugh), tracing back to a Proto-Germanic root 'hlahjan'—a cousin of German 'lachen' and Dutch 'lachen.' The whole family is thought to be echoic, born by imitating the actual sound of the act: that breathy 'hah-hah' rendered into letters. The silent 'gh' in our spelling is a fossil of the old guttural 'hh' sound, once truly pronounced before English quietly swallowed it.
- contagious by design
- hearing laughter triggers your brain to mimic it
- rare solo act
- thirty times likelier in company than alone
- older than speech
- rats and apes laugh when tickled too
- hidden workout
- hard laughing burns calories and spikes heart rate
- pain killer
- it floods the body with natural endorphins
laughing kookaburra — australian bird species whose call sounds like human laughter, found in eastern australia
laughing gas — nitrous oxide (n2o), anesthetic used in dentistry and surgery since the 1840s
the laughing cavalier — 1624 painting by frans hals in the wallace collection, london, of a smiling man