About

Over 9000 Hours in Ms Paint is a catchphrase and snowclone (Over X Hours In Paint) used to highlight, often in exageration, the amount of effort and time put into an artwork, usually a drawing created in Microsoft's basic illustration tool MS Paint. The phrase has since become adopted by online artists as tongue-in-cheek titles for and descriptions of their drawings.

Origin

While commenting on the time put into any creation is a recurring habit among people outside of internet, one of the earliest online mentions of anyone genuinely describing the time they took in making a picture using Ms Paint was TRMK forum user Gororules, posting a thread on November 15th 2004 about sprites he made^[1]. Then, its first online mention as an hyperbole can be found in a July 2005 thread made on the official Winamp website in which user gaekwad2 commented that the image creation of a desktop by another user "[…] must have takenat (sic) least 500 hours in MS Paint"^[2].

Spread

research in progress

On September 4th 2005, Newgrounds user MidnyteRayne sarcastically replied "5,000,000 hours in MS paint." to a post asking what progams were used to make Canadian tv show ReBoot^[3]. As early as 2011, the Lurkmore website began mentioning the usage of the phrasal template "x hours in MS Paint" as being commonplace on 4chan's /b/ (random) board as well as being often mixed with the Over 9000 slang^[4]. These common occurances were also reported on TvTropes, naming it "9001 hours in MS Paint" as an example of memetic mutation from 4chan related to the MS Paint software^[5].

External References