Submission 7,045

IMHO

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About

IMHO is an abbreviation for the phrases "in my humble opinion" or "in my honest opinion."

Origin

The exact origin of the abbreviation is unknown. On February 23rd, 1984, "IMHO" was used in the Usenet newsgroup net.video as an abbreviation for "in my honest opinion" on February 23rd, 1984.^[11]

"The Sony and Maxell tapes are, imho [in my honest opinion], almost indistinguishable in quality, and are the only kind I buy now. Both give a very sharp picture, in many cases as good as the original transmission, the colors are very sharp, and they appear to be just
as good the nth time around as the 1st time."

Spread

In 1986, a glossary of email acronyms was included in an edition of PC Magazine,^[8] which defined "IMHO" as an abbreviation for "in my humble opinion." On June 12th, 1990, an edition of the hacker slang document "The Jargon File" was released, which defined IMHO as an abbreviation for "In My Humble Opinion."^[1] According to the document, the initialism originated "from SF fandom via Usenet."

IMHO [from SF fandom via USENET] Written acronym for In My Humble Opinion. Example: "IMHO, mixed-case C names should be avoided, as mistyping someting in the wrong case can cause hard-to-detect errors -- and they look too Pascalish anyhow.

On October 22nd, 2002, Urban Dictionary^[5] user latinlover submitted an entry for "IMHO," defining it as "in my humble opinion" (shown below).

IMHO D In my humble opinion That is correct, IMHO

On February 2nd, 2012, the question "Is 'IMHO' a rude thing to say (or type)" was submitted to the site StackExchange.^[10]

Debate

On April 9th, 2014, Redditor kevinciviced7 submitted a post asking "IMHO: In My Humble Opinion, or In My Honest Opinion?" to the /r/AskReddit^[4] subreddit.

On May 2nd, BuzzFeed published an article asking "Help Us Solve This Debate About What 'IMHO' Stands For," claiming that staff were debating the meaning of the initialism.

Later that day, BuzzFeed^[6] published a followup article titled "IMHO: Does It Stand For 'In My Humble Opinion' Or 'In My Honest Opinion'?"^[2] That day, The Atlantic^[9] published an article titled "There Is Only One Thing IMHO Can Mean," citing several early definitions of the abbreviation which used the word "humble." On May 3rd, The Today Show aired a segment discussing the debate over the acronym's meaning (shown below).