About

"Spoiler" is a slang term referring to summaries or descriptions of plot elements that give away important details to a work of fiction. It is considered a faux pas to reveal spoilers without a warning, which is often used as a method of trolling online.

Origin

The earliest known use of the term in reference to the dissemination of plot elements in fiction was in an article titled "Spoilers" published in the magazine National Lampoon in April 1971, which contained a list of spoilers for various films.^[4] Online, spoiler warnings were often used in newsgroups in the early 1990s to precede key plot information in various media, including literature, films and television.^[3] On Usenet, blank lines referred to as a "spoiler space" were used to obscure spoiler information by pushing them to the next page of a 25-line terminal.^[12]

Spread

On October 23rd, 1999, the film spoiler website The Movie Spoiler^[8] was launched. On January 29th, 2005, Urban Dictionary^[1] user Pheon1xBorn submitted an entry for "spoiler," defining it as being told something "you likely would have rather learned on your own." On April 13th, the television spoiler database Spoiler TV^[10] was created. On July 16th, a photograph of a page from the book Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince revealing the spoiler "Snape kills Dumbledore" was widely spread online by Internet trolls (shown below, left). On May 31st, 2006, the webcomic xkcd^[11] published a comic titled "Spoiler Alert" in reference to the Harry Potter spoiler (shown below, right).

On September 17th, 2010, The New York Times^[7] published an article about spoilers in Wikipedia. In October 2013, the app Spoiler Shield^[10] was released to block spoilers mentions in social media feeds.

On Netflix

In September 2013, Netflix launched the "Spoiler Foiler"^[6] app, which hides spoilers for the television drama series Breaking Bad from users' Twitter feeds. In February 2014, the app was updated to block spoilers for the television show House of Cards.

On September 23rd, Netflix^[5] launched the site Spoiler Yourself, featuring a web app that randomly selects a clip from pivotal moments in various films and television shows.

Search Interest

External References