Textese (also known as txtese, chatspeak, textspeak, texting language, or txt talk) is a term for the abbreviations and slang most commonly used due to the necessary brevity of mobile phone text messaging, though its use is common on the Internet, including e-mail and instant messaging. It can be likened to a rebus, which uses pictures and single letters, or numbers to represent whole words (e.g, "i <3 u" means “I love you”, b4 means before, lol means laugh out loud, etc. ).

　　短信文（英文为textese，也可以用txtese, chatspeak, textspeak, texting language, 或 txt talk来表示）指为了保证手机短信的简短而使用的缩写和俗语表达，现在也通用于电子邮件和即时信息等网络交流工具中。这种短信文是由图片、字母或数字的组合来代表某个单词的，感觉像字谜一样。比如："i <3 u"就代表“我爱你”（中间的<3像是一颗心的形状，代表“爱”），b4就是before（以前）这个单词的缩写形式，而lol则是laugh out loud（大声笑出来）这三个单词的缩写。

　　The objective of textese is to use the fewest number of characters needed to convey a comprehensible message, another benefit of textese is to reduce the character count of a message, hence, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization are largely ignored.

　　短信文出现的目的是用最少的字母来传递意思完整的信息，另外，因为短信文可以减少信息中使用的字符数，所以标点符号、语法以及大小写等规则在短信文中也都被忽略了。