KEKW
KEKW is a Twitch chat emote that means laughter. It shows a still of the Spanish comedian Juan Joya Borja, known as El Risitas, mid-laugh, and chat types it the way other people type LOL.
Where it comes from
The image is from a June 2007 interview on the Spanish TV programme Ratones Coloraos, in which Borja breaks down laughing while telling a story about throwing kitchen pans into the sea. The clip became a meme in its own right years before the emote existed.
The emote itself was submitted to FrankerFaceZ on 21 August 2019 by the user Keesual. It spread across Twitch over the following weeks after large chats such as xQc’s and AdmiralBulldog’s enabled it.
The “KEK” part is older than Twitch: in World of Warcraft, a Horde player typing “LOL” appears to Alliance players as “KEK” because of the game’s cross-faction language scrambling, and the word stuck as a gamer spelling of LOL.
Why you might see only the word
KEKW is not a Twitch-native emote. It is served by browser extensions, FrankerFaceZ and BetterTTV, that replace the text with an image for people who have them installed. Anyone without the extension, including most mobile viewers, sees the plain text “KEKW”. The same is true in chat logs and in any tool that reads chat as text.
How it is used
As a reaction to something funny, or sarcastically to something that failed. Variants stack other emote suffixes onto the name; the base form is the one worth knowing.
Sources
Checked 2026-10-30.