ROFLcopter

About

According to Urbandictionary.com, the term ROFLCOPTER originated in the Warcraft III forums:

ROFLCOPTER:

Invented by a Blizzard moderator on the Warcraft III forum. There is always much whining going on on those official forums, much sucking up to moderators and an awful lot of ‘BLUE!!! PLZ REPLY!!!1one’ (Blue = color of moderator posts), so when a mod posts something, you can bet there’ll be thousands of people jumping on it, if only to spam ‘BLUE FIX GARGZ PLZZZZ’ or ‘first reply woooot!’ after it in the vain hope that the mod will read it and react.

So when one invented this new buzzword, it was grabbed and squeezed out and spread like a virus across all of the Blizzard forums and from there over the internet.

Roflcopter.com was created on March 30th, 2004, featuring nothing more than an animated GIF of an ASCII Helicopter. (See: roflcopter.com archived May 7th, 2004)

Wiktionary credits Roflcopter.com with popularising the term, but points out that it may have been used as early as 2003.

Y.T.M.N.D.

The first ROFLcopter YTMND was created by xeonshockwave on May 1st, 2004 and has been viewed over 14,000 times.

• ROFL COPTER ROFL!!!

The most viewed and highest-rated ROFLcopter YTMND was created by Chyort on July 8th, 2006 and has been viewed 173,052 times.

• RoflCopter Takeoff Final

As of February, 2010, there have been a total of 143 ROFLcopter YTMNds created.

• Click here to see the most up to date YTMND search results for ROFLcopter.

Youtube

Google Insights

Searches for RoflCopter begin to show up in March of 2004. By September of 2005, searches for the term seem to have mostly leveled out, mostly maintaining search volume without much decrease for the last 6 years.