I had a hard time finding the English origin of this interjection and how it technically should be written. I am often ridiculed in written conversations, especially those that are informal, because I might reply to something funny with, "Ha ha ha." It seems as if the accepted way to colloquially spell this is "hahaha."
When asked about it, I actually admitted that the original spelling might have been something like "ha-ha-ha," similar to how "goodbye" seems to have been originally written as "good-bye."
What is the correct way?
Best Answer
ODO has “ha ha”. Normal rules of capitalization, punctuation and the like apply, so a complete interjection might be written “Ha ha ha!”
As an onomatopaeic word, it would be possible to join the individual sounds together to get hahaha but this is more suited to less formal environments.
Don’t hyphenate it, because a ha-ha is something rather different.