From Object Matrimony to LTR: How Personal Ads Learned to Talk in Code

By Alex · September 28, 2026

In October 1905 a farmer in Walla Walla, Washington, paid for this line in the Evening Statesman:

HONORABLE, INTELLIGENT, WELL to do farmer, widower, aged 45, wishes the acquaintance of a lady not over 40. Object matrimony.

Eighty years later a newspaper would have printed the same ad as something like Wid M, 45, FS, ISO F under 40, LTR. Widowed male, financially secure, in search of a woman under forty, for a long-term relationship. The original is in our archive; the code version is our translation.

The two ads carry the same information in the same order. That is the surprising thing about the language of personal ads: the code came long before the acronyms. For a century and a half people have needed to say the same few things in as little space as possible, and every generation found its own shorthand.

Before 1914: the formulas

Nineteenth-century personal ads were written in prose, but it was prose with rules. A writer said who they were, what they had, what they wanted, and how to reply, in phrases so standard that readers could skim them. There were whole newspapers for it: The Matrimonial Bazar in Chicago from 1869 and Matrimonial News in Kansas City in the 1880s, and in Britain around twenty-five matrimonial papers by 1900.

The formulas covered everything a later code would. The purpose was object matrimony, or with a view to matrimony, or matrimonially inclined. Money was stated openly: of means, well to do, or, honestly, moderate circumstances. Character came as refined, moral habits, or of loving disposition. Verification was photographs exchanged. And the filter at the end was no triflers: serious replies only.

Even the rare exceptions proved the rule. In 1905 a New Haven woman kept the whole formula and changed one word: object sociability. Everyone who read it knew exactly what she meant.

The First World War and the 1920s: marriage splits in two

The 1921 census of England and Wales counted 19.8 million women and 18 million men, with the gap widest among people in their twenties and thirties. In the same years the personal column broadened. Alongside object matrimony came companionship, a partner for outings, and friendship by letter. Merriam-Webster dates the word pen pal to 1925, and lonely hearts clubs, which charged a fee and mailed members catalogs of ads, grew from here into the hundreds.

The same years produced an early form of coded signaling that looks recognizably modern: words that meant one thing to most readers and could mean another to the people they were meant for. In The Link, a British magazine founded in 1915 as a social medium for lonely people, men described themselves as artistic, musical, unconventional or broad-minded, or asked for correspondence with their own sex. Women wrote jolly, sporty, bachelor girl. Because these were ordinary descriptions, they could also work as signals to readers who recognized them.

The 1930s to the 1950s: the ad becomes a profile

Through the middle of the century the courtship ad thinned out in mainstream papers. In the Washington Evening Star of the 1930s and 1940s, the personal column mostly carried notices about lodging, work and services, and the ads looking for people were often looking for company of any kind: a club for non-smoking, cultured people, a skat player. Writers asked readers to write fully, and wartime brought new categories of person, like the service wife.

Specialized magazines went further toward the modern profile. The Hobby Directory, founded in 1946, was made entirely of personal ads in a fixed format: age, place, job, hobbies, and then C.D., contacts desired. Some of its members were gay men, who signaled one another through their listed hobbies. It closed in 1952. Merriam-Webster dates lonely hearts as a set phrase to 1949, and by 1961 there were at least 500 lonely hearts clubs.

The 1960s and 1970s: from money to personality

When the personal ad came back into fashion, what people advertised had changed. The first personal in the New York Review of Books, on July 11, 1968, read in full:

WIFE WANTED. Intelligent, beautiful, 18 to 25, broad-minded, sensitive, affectionate. For accomplished artist and exciting life. NYR box 1432.

In this ad, means have disappeared. Looks, personality and sensibility have taken their place.

The Village Voice ran personals from the 1960s, and in 1966 the London paper International Times printed the first openly gay personal ads (Wikipedia, Personal advertisement). Singles newspapers of the mid-1970s show the new vocabulary of looks, graded like produce: attractive, very attractive, extremely attractive. Compare the 1862 New York writer who called himself good looking but not handsome.

The 1980s and 1990s: initialitis

Then the price of space did what it always does. By the early 1980s the codes were established enough that a 1981 Washington Post article on writing singles ads described a class called SWM seeks SWF. Most papers charged a couple of dollars a word, and an average ad could cost around fifty dollars. Writers compressed everything that could be compressed, and a whole grid of initials appeared: SWF and SWM, DWF, SJM, SWPF, and in gay papers GWM and GBM. One 1980s Village Voice ad quoted by the Smithsonian opens GWM-BiM, 44 rara avis! Attr, strt lkg/actg WASP wd lk exceptal G or BiM for frndshp, prhps more. The writer Sharyn Wolf called it initialitis. Some papers pushed back; the Seattle Weekly banned abbreviations altogether.

The grid covered status, race or religion, orientation and sex, and the rest of the ad followed in code too: ISO, WLTM, LTR, NS, NK, FS, HWP, VGL, ALA. British lonely hearts columns had their own: GSOH, WLTM, OHAC for own house and car. Where a word was too blunt, a euphemism did the work: not materialistic, Rubenesque. In 1989 the bear community designed an entire code of its own, letters and symbols for describing yourself in a single line. And in the gay papers of the late 1980s, the AIDS crisis added new phrases, like safe only.

Craigslist: the category becomes the syntax

Online personals removed the price of each word, but not the habit. Craigslist, which began in 1995, turned the old opening clause into a label: m4w, w4m, m4m, w4w, and later t4t, at the start of every post. Its 2005 guide to acronyms reads like a dictionary of the era: SP for strictly platonic, RL for real life, a/s/l from the chat rooms, NSA, FWB, DDF, 420. Craigslist closed its US personals in March 2018.

Apps: the codes become fields

Dating apps took the grid apart. Age, gender, distance and photos are profile fields now, so nobody needs SWF. What survives in free text is the part that fields do not capture: what kind of relationship someone wants. LTR, FWB and ONS are still everywhere, and a new vocabulary has grown up around open relationships: ENM, poly, NRE, compersion, unicorn.

AseeksB sits at the end of this line. When you write a post, you choose who it is for by gender and age range, and Supporters can add distance. That is the Walla Walla farmer's clause, a lady not over 40, turned into a setting, so the post itself can be about the person writing it.

The same jobs, 170 years apart

A personal ad has always had to do the same few jobs. This table shows how each era did them. The words in a row are not translations of one another; they are different generations' answers to the same need.

The acronyms were new. The grammar was not.

Sources: Wikipedia, Personal advertisement; Smithsonian, Advertising for Love; National Postal Museum; The Genealogist, Lonely Hearts; UK National Archives; Wikipedia, The Hobby Directory; The New York Review of Books; Atlas Obscura; Philadelphia Gay News; Bear World; Craigslist acronym guide (2005); The Washington Post, Singles: Advertising Yourself (1981); ONS, 1921 census; Dictionary.com, OHAC; Merriam-Webster entries for pen pal, lonely hearts and polyamory.