NSFW

NSFW means “not safe for work.” It’s a warning that a link, image or post contains something you wouldn’t want on your screen at work or in public, like nudity, gore or strong language.

What NSFW means

It’s a label, not a judgment. Putting NSFW on a post tells people to wait until they’re somewhere private before they click. Some platforms let creators tag whole posts or accounts that way, so the content is blurred or hidden until someone chooses to see it. The opposite tag is SFW, safe for work.

People also use it loosely, as a joke, for things that are only mildly embarrassing: “NSFW but here’s my search history from 3 a.m.”

Examples

• “Don’t open that link on the office Wi-Fi, it’s NSFW.”
• “NSFW (language): the full rant is in the replies.”
• “The trailer is SFW, the movie very much isn’t.”

NSFW vs. NSFL

NSFL means “not safe for life,” or sometimes “not safe for lunch.” It warns about content that is disturbing rather than explicit: graphic injuries, violence or anything that might put you off your food. Know Your Meme traces it to an Urban Dictionary entry from January 2008.

Where NSFW came from

Know Your Meme’s earliest example of “not safe for work” is a headline on the news site Fark from August 22, 2000, with the abbreviation turning up on Usenet in late 2001 and early 2002. Wikipedia, citing Vice, points to an earlier forum tag, NFBSK, “not for British school kids.” Fark’s founder, Drew Curtis, applied to trademark NSFW in 2007, but the application was abandoned in 2009.

Dictionaries caught up over the next decade: Oxford Dictionaries Online added it in 2011, Merriam-Webster in 2015 and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016.

Related terms

• TL;DR: too long; didn’t read.
• ICYMI: in case you missed it.
• DM: direct message.
• FYI: for your information.

See more terms like this in our texting abbreviations guide.