Copypasta
You might remember it as Bee Movie script, Navy Seal copypasta
This spread through many posts rather than one canonical upload.
2006·Early YouTube·nostalgic
A block of text that is copied and pasted from place to place across the internet, usually as a joke or to provoke.
At a glanceThe facts
- Remembered as
- Bee Movie script
- Spread in
- 2006
- Format
- Post
- Where it started
- The word is traced to an anonymous 4chan thread in 2006
- Original title
- From “copy and paste”
- Origin
- No single original
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
A block of text — a furious rant, an implausible boast, an entire film script — is copied and pasted into a conversation where it does not belong. The point is the pasting: nothing is linked, nothing is credited, and each copy is identical to the last. The name is a corruption of copy-paste, by way of the older forum insult that a repost was pasta.
It is the internet's folk-literature mechanism, and it is much older than the web — the same texts circulated as faxlore and before that as photocopied office jokes. It is also the one meme format that no platform change can kill, because it requires nothing but a text field. Creepypasta, the horror genre, is a direct derivative and named after it.
Individual copypastas have become fixtures with their own histories — a chest-beating military threat, a Reddit post about the ownership of certain aquatic mammals, the complete script of an animated film about bees posted at length into unrelated comment sections. The form has outlasted every site it was invented on.
TimelineIn order
- Made
The word appears, on 4chan, Usenet and Urban Dictionary.1
- Made
The earliest known posting of the Navy Seal copypasta, on 4chan.1
- Made
The whole script of the 2007 film Bee Movie begins to be pasted on Reddit and Tumblr.1
- Made
A baseball commentator interrupts his own on-air apology to describe a home run, and the sentence becomes a copypasta.1
What people misrememberSet straight
Commonly remembered asIt is the same thing as creepypasta.
ActuallyCreepypasta is horror stories shared online. The words are distinct.1
Why it is here: something the internet still knows by name · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast · still being watched and quoted years later
Where it came fromWhat we know
This spread through many posts rather than one identifiable original. No copy is held here — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is what this page can tell you.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this. It spread through many posts rather than from one identifiable original.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
More from 2006You were there
SourcesWhat was read
Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things