spam

Meanings

Noun

• Unsolicited bulk electronic messages.
• Any undesired electronic content automatically generated for commercial purposes.
• A type of tinned meat made mainly from ham.

Verb

• To send spam (i.e. unsolicited electronic messages.)
• To send spam (i.e. unsolicited electronic messages) to a person or entity.
• To do something rapidly and repeatedly.
• To post the same text repeatedly with disruptive effect; to flood.

Related

Narrower meaning words

• blog spam
• e-mail spam/email spam
• log spam
• messaging spam
• mobile phone spam
• newsgroup spam
• referer spam
• social networking spam
• social spam

Origin

• The original sense (canned ham) is a proprietary name registered by Geo. A. Hormel & Co. in U.S., 1937. It is presumed to be a conflation of either spiced ham or shoulder of pork and ham but was soon extended to other kinds of canned meat. Hormel spells the trademarked name in all upper case.
• The use for unsolicited and unwanted email derives from a Monty Python sketch (). In the 1970 sketch, a group of Vikings in a restaurant repeatedly chant the word "spam". The earliest recorded real-life use for this sense occurs around which finds reference in an dated March 31, 1993.
• The term appears to have been used earlier in a different sense in relation to "Multi-User Dungeons" (MUDs), a kind of multi-user computer gaming environment before widespread use of the Internet, in the 1980s.