YOLO
Abbreviation with 2 meanings
| Stands for | You only live once |
|---|---|
| Meanings | 2 |
| Categories | Texting & Internet Slang, Technology & Computing |
YOLO has two meanings. It stands for You only live once (texting and chat) or You Only Look Once (artificial intelligence).
Meanings of YOLO at a glance
| # | YOLO stands for | Context |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | You only live once | Texting & Internet Slang › Texting and Chat |
| 2 | You Only Look Once | Technology & Computing › Artificial Intelligence |
1. You only live once
Texting & Internet Slang · Texting and Chat Abbreviations
Justifies a risky, impulsive or fun decision, as in "booked a trip to Bali, yolo." It became a rallying cry for spontaneous behavior among teens and young adults in the early 2010s.
Example: Quit my job to travel for a year, yolo, wish me luck.
Popularized by Drake's 2011 song "The Motto." The Lonely Island parodied it in their 2013 song "YOLO," and the word became a target of mockery. Often used ironically now, and as a label for reckless stock trades on finance forums.
2. You Only Look Once
Technology & Computing · Artificial Intelligence Abbreviations
A family of real-time object detection models that locate and classify every object in an image in a single pass of a neural network, fast enough for video. It is widely used in robotics, traffic monitoring, retail analytics and drones.
Example: The YOLO model counts cars at the intersection at 30 frames per second on a small edge device.
Introduced by Joseph Redmon and colleagues in a 2015 paper; later versions came from various groups, with the company Ultralytics releasing widely used versions such as YOLOv5 and YOLOv8. Redmon stopped computer vision research in 2020, citing military and privacy concerns. In slang, YOLO means "you only live once", the far more familiar meaning.
Related abbreviations
More texting and chat abbreviations
- 143 – I love you
- 2DAY – Today
- 2MORO – Tomorrow
- 2NITE – Tonight
- 420 – Cannabis (code from the time 4:20)
- 4EVER – Forever
- ABT – About
- AFAIC – As far as I'm concerned
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