A salute made of characters — the o is a head, the 7 a raised arm — from a spaceship game's chat into every community that needed to say 'respect' in two keystrokes. The record's entry for the salute as typography, and the ancestor of the 🫡 emoji.
For the record: o7 is not a joke, it is a shorthand. The joke is what happens when someone outside the group tries to use it as one.
My first sighting was 2005, in a reply from someone I have never met, and I understood it immediately. That is the closest thing to magic the internet still does.
'o7' as the only reply to a colleague's leaving message, from forty people, in a company channel in 2023. The record notes none of them played EVE, and all of them saluted.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
