I Don’t Believe You

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What Does I Don’t Believe You Mean?

“I don’t believe you” is a phrase commonly abbreviated in Internet slang as IDBY. This sequence of four capital letters replaces the fully written phrase in modern digital communications.

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Techopedia Explains I Don’t Believe You

Like many other chat slang abbreviations, IDBY is simply a way to say a phrase more quickly, or, more accurately, to write it more quickly. The use of these types of abbreviations mainly arose out of a need to communicate via text message. The earliest phones and mobile devices had labor-intensive text messaging, where users had to press keypad buttons multiple times to produce one letter. That is one reason many of these abbreviations started to be used commonly. Modern smartphones have touchscreen alphanumeric keypads, but it still takes a relatively long time to type on them, and so people still use these abbreviations to communicate via text message or even online from a keyboard.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.