SMH

abbreviation

'Shaking my head'; an expression of disapproval or disbelief

What does SMH mean?

SMH (also written as smh) stands for "shaking my head." The variant SMDH means "shaking my damn head." SMH is also sometimes glossed as "scratching my head."

Examples of SMH

The This Is Us star shared a photo to her Instagram Stories which showed a brown box with familiar Amazon labelling sitting on the steps outside a destroyed property. "Do better, Amazon. Can we not have better discretion than to leave a package at a residence that no longer exists? This is my mother and father in law's home. Smh," Moore, 40, wrote.
— Chatham Daily News (Chatham, Ont.), Feb. 15 2025

Many social-media users are retweeting and resharing some of the tweets on their own, causing them to go viral - like the one in which Kelce wrote, "I hate it when the #Chipotle line is damn near to the door ... Smh.”
— The Winnipeg Sun, 26 Nov. 2023

Where does SMH come from?

SMH is an abbreviation formed from the first letters of the phrase it stands for. Like LOL ("laugh out loud," "laughing out loud"), smh offers the reader a gesture—a shaking head—as opposed to a simple phrase or statement, the way that abbreviations like brb ("be right back") and FWIW ("for what it's worth") do. The abbreviation has been in use since at least the early 1990s.