About

A Cursor Park or Cursor Parking Lot is a space on a Google Docs page designated for placing your mouse cursor when you're not actively editing the document. The lot is defined by a design made out of keyboard characters, often in a rectangular shape but sometimes more elaborate, resembling things like parks, zoos and picnic areas. The idea of a cursor park was first posted to Twitter in May 2019 and went viral on the platform in July 2021, spreading over the following year and becoming increasingly popular in late 2022.

Origin

On May 16th, 2019, Twitter^[1] user @alindeman posted a now-deleted image of a "cursor park and nature preserve," meaning an area for people to place their cursors on a Google Doc when not active that resembles a nature preserve in design (shown below). The tweet resulted in numerous comments from users sharing their own Twitter parks, including Twitter^[2] user @jenniferdaniel who shared an elaborate ocean-themed cursor park, garnering over 40 likes in four years. The user also shared a link to a Google Doc containing several cursor parks for people to copy and paste

Spread

On July 29th, 2021, Twitter^[3] user @ahl posted an image of a cursor parking lot with several cursors inside of it created on Google Docs, writing, "Always be sure to provide ample parking when presenting a google doc," garnering over 119,000 likes and 16,000 retweets in eighteen months (shown below). It was reposted to /r/BrandNewSentence^[4] on August 3rd, garnering over 23,900 upvotes in roughly the same amount of time.

On October 6th, 2022, Twitter^[5] user @_inundata posted an image of his own cursor parking lot, writing, "This has been really helpful in Google docs," garnering over 103,000 likes in three months (shown below). The meme gained viral spread over the following weeks, including a post by Instagram^[6] user kalesalad that garnered over 55,000 likes in three months and a post by Facebook^[7] page Humans of Tumblr, garnering over 8,000 reactions and 1,100 shares in the same rough span of time.

On October 12th, the official @Lenovo TikTok^[8] page posted a video about cursor parking lots, garnering over 9.5 million views in three months (shown below, left). On November 2nd, the official @Google TikTok^[9] page posted a video showing a more elaborate cursor parking lot designed to look like a cafe, garnering over 11.5 million views in two months (shown below, right).

On December 30th, TikToker^[10] @ochemlover posted a video of a cursor parking lot, wondering what the point is, garnering over 6.6 million views in five days (shown below). On an unknown date, a "cursor park" layout was added to coda.io^[11] allowing interested people to copy and paste it onto their Docs.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References