Copypasta
Etymology
Coined on 4chan around 2006 as a playful mutation of “copy-paste,” with “-paste” reshaped into “pasta.” It described chunks of text — rants, jokes, hoaxes — pasted verbatim into thread after thread until repetition itself was the joke. The name turned a mechanical action into a genre.
noun · /KOP-ee-pahs-tuh/
A block of text copied and pasted repeatedly across the internet until it becomes a meme.
What it names
Text that spreads by literal duplication, a purely verbal form of the meme.
Example
Someone dropped the entire “Navy SEAL” copypasta into the chat, and everyone groaned in recognition.
Related idea
A meme mutates as it spreads and often lives in images; copypasta is defined by staying textually identical, its power coming from exact repetition.
See also