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Part of a series on Internet Slang. [View Related Entries]


WALL OF TEXT WALL OF TEXT WALL OF TEXT WALL OF TEXT Oh,come on!!II! WALL WALL OF TEXT WALL OF TEXT WALL OF TEXT WALL OF TEXT WALL OF TEXT 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…

clearly asserted itself in the apparently meticulously intricate typing which
was simultaneously a long unpunctuated nonsensical run on sentence and yet a
photograph perfectly halftoned into dots shaped as letters of the alphabet
no doubt generated by a cybernetic system that creates fractal branched
sentences which never end but instead sort of parenthesize and go for a ways
and then change course usually by going into detail in a tangential sort of
stackpush that never pops but instead keeps zooming in yet another level
each line or so like an infinite inwards motion that doesn't even need
punctuation and takes the reader on a one-way trip forwards into
progressively refined images much like the incredible shrinking man or
Fantastic Voyage except that it just keeps on going so actually the effect
is more like the colored oilslick breakdowns in 2001 and if you could get
the wave action of the text into just the right peristaltic contractions in
sync with the eye and mind of the audience it could get pretty awesome like
nanotech cities living on the bark of redwood trees in undulating valleys of
forests on nonspherical fiberspace membranes extruded by femtopicotek
nested-space 3.2-dimensional manifolds "bigger at the small end of the
scale" provided you have senses which don't peter out when things get subtle
thus allowing you to encode information in the very borderlines of its very
existence thus relying on the viewer's idiosyncrasies more than on his
common-ness because things which are on the edge of not being there at all
are going to probably excite a set of simultaneous responses which don't
triangulate or intersect or agree or synergize in an unambiguated crisp
singleness and are also somewhat partial and even flickering or dynamic or
changing rapidly with time which requires their mind(s) to choose from a
bifurcating multiplexing divergence of (mildly) resonant rapidly-evolving
attractors forming a ghostly community of evaporatory cooperative "temporary
friends" sharing fleeting memories because a localized continuity of thought
is maintained on more than one level


hAIry 14:41 tue21nov96 "fractal fuzzybushes of worlds: godhead datastructor"
--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

May the best hallucination win.


I want a God who takes responsibility for His mistakes.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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]

ULYSSES JAMES JOYCE
JONATHAN THE章EOE ROTTERS CLUBo A book to cherish, a book to reread, a book to buy for all your friends' William Sutcliffe, Independent on Sundas 0

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]

1. wall of text 484 up, 46 down A piece of writing that does not use proper grammar and generally looks like a giant essay with 20 to 400 sentences without using paragraphs or any bit of spacing at all John writes: i am good in english, i try my best in doing what i do what i think is best and that im pretty intelligent be honest its not that hard but i find it easier for me to just write it like this, and i hope it can be easy for people to read this too. i like writing about stuff. i like chicken. i like food. i like eating. eating is great. blah blah ian bian bian. I am awesome. I arm coO, believe im awesorme and Coo isnt that awesome and cool????? when it comes to doing this, to Stan writes: WALL OF TEXT buy wall of text mugs & shirts by Gearbox ox Aug 31, 2005 re this add a video

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.

DOWN AT THE POST OFFICE HI, DO You SELL LETTER OPENERS? CAN DO You ONE BETTER! WEVE ACTUALLY BEEN HEARING A LOT OF COMPLAINTS ABOUT THE LETTER OPENERS RECENT- LY. YoU KNOW, THEY'RE OLD FASHIONED,THEYRE AwKwARD HOLIDA NOTICE 爪 TO USE, AND IF THEYRE SHARP ENOUGH TO SLICE PAPER THEN THEYRE SHARP ENOUGH TO CAUSE SPONTANECUS DISEM- BOWELINGS-THAT KIND OF THING. SO WEVE JUS COME OUT WITH THIS GREAT NEW THE RENNELOPE! THATS SHORT FOR REUSABLE ENVELOPE!) urTo 30.. 052 30-50..0.93 丨 10 PRODUCT AWTHATS TOTALLY A NEAT WELL THIS IS THE ENVELOPE OF THE FUTURE!ILL EXPLAIN HOW IT WDRKS DEA, BUT- ITS BASICALLY A SERIES OF INTERLOCKING UICITE SLEEVES THAT FIT TO- GETHER S0 GHTLY THAT THEY ALLOW FOR OPTIMAL LETTER PROTECTION ITHOUT THE NEED FOR A SEALING, COMPOUND, WHICH IN TURN ELIMINATES THE NEED FOR A LETTER OPENER! Now,I KNOW WHAT YOURE GONNA ASK- IF ITS NOT ACTUALLY SEALED THEN IT COULD BE OPENED BY ANY MAIL FRAUD ARTIST, RIGHTWHATS THE DEAL?! WELL IT GETS BETTER THE RENVELOPE HAS AN ADDITIONAL OUTER CASING WHICH IS FORTIFIED WITH AN UNBREAKABLE 200-DIGIT COMBINATON LOCKTHE COMBINATION KNOWN ONLY TO THE SENDER oF THE RENVELOPE! S0, How DOES THE RECIPIENT ACCESS THE LETTER IFTS LOCKED?WELL ILL℡L YOKu ALL YOU D0 IS MAIL A SERIES OF 12 ADDITIONAL LOCKLESS RENVEL OPES IN TWO-DAY INTERVALS RENVELOPE. IN EACH OF THESE SECONDARY R A PIECE OF PAPER ω1TH A NUMERIC CODE ON IT, BUT 11 OF THE /2 ω1LL ING THE MAILING OF THE ORIGINAL DUMMY CODES TO THROW OFF ANY CRIMINALS WHO MIGHT IN THEM IN AN ATTEMPT TO BREACH THE ORIGINAL LOCKED TH ENNELOPE CONTAINING THE TRUE CODE IS DISTINGUISHED BY A SECRET TERMARK THAT IS SCRAMBLED WITH A SECONDARY CODE THATS KNDUN ONLY TO T CODE YOU JUST TRANSMIT TO THE RECIPIENT ONE MONTH AHEAD OF TME VIA A TELEGRAM PHERED USING A TERTIARY CODE SYSTEM AGREED UPON BEFdREHAND BY THE TWO PARTIES DURING,LETS SAY,A SERIES OF DECEPTNELY UNREMARKABLE TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONS IN THE WEEKS LEADING INTENDED RECIPIENT OF E MAILINGS! THIS COED OF CURSE AND THEN DEC UP TO THE POSTING OF THE ORIGINAL LOCKED REVVELOFE IN GUESTION So YoUR LETTER IS BASICALLY GUARANTEED TO REACH ITS DESTINATION UNMOLESTED,AND TO GET AT IT ALL You DO IS JUST PUT IN THE MASTER CODE, REMOVE THE OUTER CASING, PULL APART THE VARIOUS SECURITY SLEENES,AND VOILA, YoUVE eoT YaR CREDIT CARD BIL oR YOUR VALUABLE ČOUPONS OR WHATE THE RENVELOPE COMES IN PACKS OF 13,39,OR I7, AND THERE'S- UH, ARE YOU ALRIGHT..? HoLY CRIPES,THIS IS So WEIRD! MY ARM IS, LIKE,MOVING BY ITSELF! WHAT IS-

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

[1] alt.books.phil-k-dick – Wall of text with subtle picture

[2] alt.sci.time-travel – Wall of text with subtle picture

[3] alt.ascii-art – Wall of text with subtle picture

[4] TV Tropes – Wall Of Text

[5] Wikipedia – Ulysses (novel)

[6] Wikipedia – Molly Bloom's Soliloquy

[7] Wikipedia – The Rotter's Club

[8] UseIt – Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002

[9] Urban Dictionary – Wall of Text

[10] Uncyclopedia – Wall of Text

[11] Tumblr – Posts tagged "wall of text"

[12] LiveJournal – Search results for "wall of text"

[13] Wall Of Text

[14] The Online Slang Dictionary – Wall of Text

[15] Wikipedia – Subnormality

[16] Bad Web Comics Wiki – The Wall of Text



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Wall of Text

Wall of Text

Part of a series on Internet Slang. [View Related Entries]

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WALL OF TEXT WALL OF TEXT WALL OF TEXT WALL OF TEXT Oh,come on!!II! WALL WALL OF TEXT WALL OF TEXT WALL OF TEXT WALL OF TEXT WALL OF TEXT 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…


clearly asserted itself in the apparently meticulously intricate typing which
was simultaneously a long unpunctuated nonsensical run on sentence and yet a
photograph perfectly halftoned into dots shaped as letters of the alphabet
no doubt generated by a cybernetic system that creates fractal branched
sentences which never end but instead sort of parenthesize and go for a ways
and then change course usually by going into detail in a tangential sort of
stackpush that never pops but instead keeps zooming in yet another level
each line or so like an infinite inwards motion that doesn't even need
punctuation and takes the reader on a one-way trip forwards into
progressively refined images much like the incredible shrinking man or
Fantastic Voyage except that it just keeps on going so actually the effect
is more like the colored oilslick breakdowns in 2001 and if you could get
the wave action of the text into just the right peristaltic contractions in
sync with the eye and mind of the audience it could get pretty awesome like
nanotech cities living on the bark of redwood trees in undulating valleys of
forests on nonspherical fiberspace membranes extruded by femtopicotek
nested-space 3.2-dimensional manifolds "bigger at the small end of the
scale" provided you have senses which don't peter out when things get subtle
thus allowing you to encode information in the very borderlines of its very
existence thus relying on the viewer's idiosyncrasies more than on his
common-ness because things which are on the edge of not being there at all
are going to probably excite a set of simultaneous responses which don't
triangulate or intersect or agree or synergize in an unambiguated crisp
singleness and are also somewhat partial and even flickering or dynamic or
changing rapidly with time which requires their mind(s) to choose from a
bifurcating multiplexing divergence of (mildly) resonant rapidly-evolving
attractors forming a ghostly community of evaporatory cooperative "temporary
friends" sharing fleeting memories because a localized continuity of thought
is maintained on more than one level


hAIry 14:41 tue21nov96 "fractal fuzzybushes of worlds: godhead datastructor"
--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

May the best hallucination win.


I want a God who takes responsibility for His mistakes.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------


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]


ULYSSES JAMES JOYCE JONATHAN THE章EOE ROTTERS CLUBo A book to cherish, a book to reread, a book to buy for all your friends' William Sutcliffe, Independent on Sundas 0

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]


1. wall of text 484 up, 46 down A piece of writing that does not use proper grammar and generally looks like a giant essay with 20 to 400 sentences without using paragraphs or any bit of spacing at all John writes: i am good in english, i try my best in doing what i do what i think is best and that im pretty intelligent be honest its not that hard but i find it easier for me to just write it like this, and i hope it can be easy for people to read this too. i like writing about stuff. i like chicken. i like food. i like eating. eating is great. blah blah ian bian bian. I am awesome. I arm coO, believe im awesorme and Coo isnt that awesome and cool????? when it comes to doing this, to Stan writes: WALL OF TEXT buy wall of text mugs & shirts by Gearbox ox Aug 31, 2005 re this add a video

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.


DOWN AT THE POST OFFICE HI, DO You SELL LETTER OPENERS? CAN DO You ONE BETTER! WEVE ACTUALLY BEEN HEARING A LOT OF COMPLAINTS ABOUT THE LETTER OPENERS RECENT- LY. YoU KNOW, THEY'RE OLD FASHIONED,THEYRE AwKwARD HOLIDA NOTICE 爪 TO USE, AND IF THEYRE SHARP ENOUGH TO SLICE PAPER THEN THEYRE SHARP ENOUGH TO CAUSE SPONTANECUS DISEM- BOWELINGS-THAT KIND OF THING. SO WEVE JUS COME OUT WITH THIS GREAT NEW THE RENNELOPE! THATS SHORT FOR REUSABLE ENVELOPE!) urTo 30.. 052 30-50..0.93 丨 10 PRODUCT AWTHATS TOTALLY A NEAT WELL THIS IS THE ENVELOPE OF THE FUTURE!ILL EXPLAIN HOW IT WDRKS DEA, BUT- ITS BASICALLY A SERIES OF INTERLOCKING UICITE SLEEVES THAT FIT TO- GETHER S0 GHTLY THAT THEY ALLOW FOR OPTIMAL LETTER PROTECTION ITHOUT THE NEED FOR A SEALING, COMPOUND, WHICH IN TURN ELIMINATES THE NEED FOR A LETTER OPENER! Now,I KNOW WHAT YOURE GONNA ASK- IF ITS NOT ACTUALLY SEALED THEN IT COULD BE OPENED BY ANY MAIL FRAUD ARTIST, RIGHTWHATS THE DEAL?! WELL IT GETS BETTER THE RENVELOPE HAS AN ADDITIONAL OUTER CASING WHICH IS FORTIFIED WITH AN UNBREAKABLE 200-DIGIT COMBINATON LOCKTHE COMBINATION KNOWN ONLY TO THE SENDER oF THE RENVELOPE! S0, How DOES THE RECIPIENT ACCESS THE LETTER IFTS LOCKED?WELL ILL℡L YOKu ALL YOU D0 IS MAIL A SERIES OF 12 ADDITIONAL LOCKLESS RENVEL OPES IN TWO-DAY INTERVALS RENVELOPE. IN EACH OF THESE SECONDARY R A PIECE OF PAPER ω1TH A NUMERIC CODE ON IT, BUT 11 OF THE /2 ω1LL ING THE MAILING OF THE ORIGINAL DUMMY CODES TO THROW OFF ANY CRIMINALS WHO MIGHT IN THEM IN AN ATTEMPT TO BREACH THE ORIGINAL LOCKED TH ENNELOPE CONTAINING THE TRUE CODE IS DISTINGUISHED BY A SECRET TERMARK THAT IS SCRAMBLED WITH A SECONDARY CODE THATS KNDUN ONLY TO T CODE YOU JUST TRANSMIT TO THE RECIPIENT ONE MONTH AHEAD OF TME VIA A TELEGRAM PHERED USING A TERTIARY CODE SYSTEM AGREED UPON BEFdREHAND BY THE TWO PARTIES DURING,LETS SAY,A SERIES OF DECEPTNELY UNREMARKABLE TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONS IN THE WEEKS LEADING INTENDED RECIPIENT OF E MAILINGS! THIS COED OF CURSE AND THEN DEC UP TO THE POSTING OF THE ORIGINAL LOCKED REVVELOFE IN GUESTION So YoUR LETTER IS BASICALLY GUARANTEED TO REACH ITS DESTINATION UNMOLESTED,AND TO GET AT IT ALL You DO IS JUST PUT IN THE MASTER CODE, REMOVE THE OUTER CASING, PULL APART THE VARIOUS SECURITY SLEENES,AND VOILA, YoUVE eoT YaR CREDIT CARD BIL oR YOUR VALUABLE ČOUPONS OR WHATE THE RENVELOPE COMES IN PACKS OF 13,39,OR I7, AND THERE'S- UH, ARE YOU ALRIGHT..? HoLY CRIPES,THIS IS So WEIRD! MY ARM IS, LIKE,MOVING BY ITSELF! WHAT IS-

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

[1] alt.books.phil-k-dick – Wall of text with subtle picture

[2] alt.sci.time-travel – Wall of text with subtle picture

[3] alt.ascii-art – Wall of text with subtle picture

[4] TV Tropes – Wall Of Text

[5] Wikipedia – Ulysses (novel)

[6] Wikipedia – Molly Bloom's Soliloquy

[7] Wikipedia – The Rotter's Club

[8] UseIt – Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002

[9] Urban Dictionary – Wall of Text

[10] Uncyclopedia – Wall of Text

[11] Tumblr – Posts tagged "wall of text"

[12] LiveJournal – Search results for "wall of text"

[13] Wall Of Text

[14] The Online Slang Dictionary – Wall of Text

[15] Wikipedia – Subnormality

[16] Bad Web Comics Wiki – The Wall of Text

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Top Comments

amanda b.
amanda b. Moderator

I think this is a really great submission because Walls of Texts are incredibly popular around the internet and have been for years. This probably dates back to listservs and newsgroups although I haven't done any research into it, I'm just guessing. I bet people did not want to read walls of text back then either. I would look at the Google Groups archive of newsgroups to see if there's any hits there. Every time I type newsgroups my fingers want to type newgrounds? That is really weird. I make a lot of weird typos like that, for example, nearly every single time I type "Huffington Post" my fingers want to type "Huggington Post." Could you imagine that? A whole newspaper on hugging! It would be full of kittens and pandas and fuzzy koala bears hugging each other or people. I like to hug my cat. My cat doesn't really like to be hugged though. She will scratch me and it sucks since I am allergic to my cat and I will break out in hives. True story. Anyway, back to walls of text. +1 work.

+84

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