Pls meaning: please, typed in a hurry

Please, three letters shorter

Pls is a written abbreviation of please. Dictionaries list it as internet and texting shorthand, next to plz, which is the same word one letter further from formal. You say it as “please”. Nobody reads it out as “pulls”, or if they do, they do it once.

Where pls turns up

Chats, texts, ticket comments and the subject lines of emails written on a phone. It usually sits in front of a request: “pls review”, “pls approve”, “pls send”. On its own, as a whole reply, “pls” is begging. It’s the message a coworker sends when they missed the meeting and want your notes.

Pls, plz and pls.

The spellings carry a little meaning of their own. Pls with a full stop, pls., is the tidy office version. Plz is listed as slang, one step further from the office. Stretching the word the other way, “pleeease”, turns a request into a plea, and belongs in a group chat about cake rather than a ticket queue.

Pls in a subject line

Subject lines are where pls does its most efficient work: “Pls approve: Q3 invoice 4471” fits on a phone’s lock screen with room to spare. That’s also where it looks most like an order, because a subject line has no greeting to soften it. If the subject says pls, the first line of the email can say hello.

Abbreviations read as less sincere

In eight experiments, texters who used abbreviations came across as less sincere and got shorter, fewer replies. Across more than 200,000 conversations on a dating app, more abbreviations went with shorter conversations. Readers took the shortcut as low effort and answered with low effort back. The researchers had expected short forms to feel casual and close. They were surprised.

Most people don’t see it coming

Almost everyone abbreviates. 99% of people in the first survey for the same research said they do. In a later study, 80% expected readers not to care either way and 4.2% expected readers to like it. Only 15.8% guessed the penalty the experiments kept finding.

Text speak in the work inbox

At work the dislike has a number too. Slang such as OMG, LOL and WTF in work email annoys 39% of British office workers, and 60% of boomers. Pls is milder than any of those, and it comes from the same habit of typing as little as possible.

The three-letter saving

Pls saves three keystrokes, and the reader notices all three. Typed to a teammate in the middle of a busy chat, nobody minds. Typed to someone you’ve never met, in your first message, it says the request mattered less than the next thing you had to do. The cheapest version of all is “pls” typed under someone else’s request in a team channel. It means “me too”, and it’s a request with no work in it at all.

Pls advise

“Pls advise” is please advise with the courtesy trimmed and the impatience kept. Put a deadline in the same line, “pls advise by EOD”, and it reads less like a question and more like a ticket being escalated. The full word costs three more letters and buys a lot of goodwill.

Pls and the rest of the chat shorthand

Pls travels with thx, np and fwd. Each saves a few letters, and a message made of all four reads like a telegram from someone running for a train. One short form in a friendly message is fine. A whole sentence of them is a puzzle the reader has to solve before they help you. The mix gets stranger when pls shares an email with the formal opener as per: stiff in the first half, rushed in the second.

When to type the whole word

Type please in full in a first message to someone, in a request to someone senior and in anything with a deadline. Keep pls for quick back-and-forth with people who already know you’re polite. Even the researchers behind the sincerity findings say low effort is fine where the relationship doesn’t matter, like a message to a delivery driver. If the request matters, the extra three letters are cheaper than the follow-up. Staying polite under pressure at greater length is the whole job of how to professionally say it. TIA, SGTM and FWD get the same plain-words treatment in corporate jargon.

A chat message with pls in it

#design-requests, 4:51 pm

Can someone pls please export the logo as a PNG with a transparent background. The agency needs it by 9 tomorrow, and the one on the drive has a white box around it.