In My Humble Opinion

What Does In My Humble Opinion Mean?

“In my humble opinion,” abbreviated IMHO, is one of the most common chat slang or Internet slang acronyms applied to text messaging, chat rooms, social media and other venues where people type out communications. This abbreviation arose early in the rush to shorten and simplify the written English language for use in new technological platforms.

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Techopedia Explains In My Humble Opinion

As people started using things like keypad-based text messaging interfaces, they realized that it took a lot less effort to type out acronyms and abbreviations. In this case, typing out IMHO decreases the burden on the user, from 20 characters to four. That allows for quicker communication, and shorter text messaging where mobile systems might charge by the message length.

IMHO is commonly used as people often text, chat or expound on social media about their opinions on subjects. IMHO gets interjected into the conversation just to show that a statement is somebody’s opinion, and that they are not putting it forward as objective fact. It is also a kind of tool for politeness in business, where someone might propose something and explain or defend their position using the acronym IMHO to qualify it.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…