Monty Python’s 1970 sketch about canned meat gave its name to unwanted email.
In 1937, the Hormel Foods Corporation introduced SPAM, a canned pork product whose name was selected in a naming contest. The word had no prior meaning. Jay Hormel, the company president, paid $100 for the winning entry, and the exact derivation remains disputed, with candidates including Spiced Ham and Shoulder of Pork and Ham.1
In 1970, the British comedy troupe Monty Python aired a television sketch set in a café where every item on the menu contained SPAM. A chorus of Vikings drowned out all conversation by singing the word repeatedly, louder and louder, making normal communication impossible.2
In the early 1990s, users of Usenet newsgroups and internet chat rooms began using spam, lowercase, to describe repetitive, unwanted messages that flooded online forums and drowned out legitimate conversation, exactly as the Vikings had drowned out the café’s customers.3 The earliest documented use of spam in this sense dates to around 1993 on Usenet.
On April 12, 1994, immigration lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel posted a commercial advertisement to every Usenet newsgroup simultaneously, an event widely regarded as the first large-scale commercial spam.4 The backlash was immediate and intense, but the economic logic was compelling. Sending messages to millions of people cost almost nothing. Even a tiny response rate generated profit.
By 2023, spam accounted for roughly 45 percent of all global email traffic, according to Statista.5 A word invented to sell canned meat, repurposed by comedians to satirize monotony, and adopted by early internet users to name unwanted repetition had become the default descriptor for the largest category of electronic communication on earth.