Wall of Text

About

Wall of Text refers to needlessly long text posts that are often found without line or paragraph breaks. Walls of text can be found in a wide range of online conversations from spam emails and webcomic dialogue to blog posts and comment sections.

Origin

One of the earliest mentions of the phrase "wall of text" appeared in the title of a spam message posted on three unrelated newsgroups on November 21st, 1996 by a company named Valucard International. The post, "Wall of text with subtle picture," was shared on alt.books.phil-k-dick^[1], alt.sci.time-travel^[2] and alt.ascii-art^[3] with the summary "ascii art disguised as screenful of mumblejumble" and a keyword, "oh my god."

Etaoin Shridlu opened the book to where his thumbnail had randomly parted
the pages and began reading from the center of the page but noticed something
strange about the pattern of the rivulets of space around the words and soon
had lost all comprehension of the literal meaning of the passage when a picture…

In Literature

Though the phrase may not have entered online usage until 1996, a similar concept has been used in the literary device known as stream-of-consciousness since the 18th and 19th centuries, when authors would write paragraphs that continue on for pages at a time.^[4] This technique was used several times in James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses^[5], as highlighted in the final chapter “Penelope.” Also known as Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy^[6], the chapter consists of eight sentences, one of which is 4,391 words long. This was the longest sentence in English literature until 2001, when a 13,955-words long sentence was published in Jonathan Coe’s novel The Rotters' Club.^[7]

Spread

In 2002, walls of text was mentioned on UseIt.com’s list of that year’s Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes^[8], which described this type of text as intimidating, boring and hard to read. On August 31st, 2005, the first definition for the phrase was added to Urban Dictionary^[9] and two years later, it was added to Uncylopedia^[10], which presents the entry in one lengthy paragraph instead of the normal article format. In 2010, it was added to the Online Slang Dictionary.^[14]

Bloggers also use the phrase to denote especially verbose posts on Tumblr^[11] and LiveJournal^[12], which yields more than 137,000 search results for “wall of text.” In April 2008, walloftext.net^[13] was registered as a secondary domain name to someone’s personal blog, which was updated with wordy posts until February 2012. The phrase can also be used to refer to a negative trait that appears in webcomics, when artists would write in unnecessarily long dialogues that encroach on the comic’s art.^[16] Subnormality^[15] (shown below), a webcomic blog launched in 2007, is known for its lengthy dialogue scenes.

Search Interest

Search volume for "wall of text" peaked in September 2008, coinciding with the creation of the TV Tropes^[4] page for the phrase.

External References