what does boiler plate mean? where does it come from?
Boiler plate (usually spelled as one word, boilerplate) means the detailed standard wording of a contract, warranty, etc. In other words, the form language that you stick into a document. Related meanings are trite, hackneyed writing and phrases of text used repeatedly. Origin: originally it meant metal in large, flat plates, for steam boilers. From there it came to mean, in the newspaper business, unit of writing that can be used over and over without change. (There were people in the business of providing rural newspapers with short items, jokes, etc. that the newspaper could use as 'filler' to fill out its pages. For several decades these were given to the papers in the form prestamped metal plates, ready to be inserted in the the printing press.)
It used to be the hardest/toughest material around at the turn of the century. It(the saying)has kinda stuck. :-)=
This Site Might Help You. RE: what does boiler plate mean? where does it come from?
: syndicated material supplied especially to weekly newspapers in matrix or plate form 2 a: standardized text b: formulaic or hackneyed language bureaucratic boilerplate 3: tightly packed icy snow 1. plating of iron or steel for making the shells of boilers, covering the hulls of ships, etc. 2. Journalism. a. syndicated or ready-to-print copy, used esp. by weekly newspapers. b. trite, hackneyed writing. 3. the detailed standard wording of a contract, warranty, etc. 4. Informal.phrases or units of text used repeatedly, as in correspondence produced by a word-processing system. 5. frozen, crusty, hard-packed snow, often with icy patches. Also,boil'er plate. The term dates back to the early 1900s, referring to the steel used in steam boilers. From the 1890s onwards, printing plates of text for widespread reproduction were cast or stamped in steel (instead of the normal re-useable lead alloys) ready for the printing press and distributed to newspapers around the United States. They came to be known as 'boilerplates'. Until the 1950s, thousands of newspapers received and used this kind of boilerplate from the nation's largest supplier, the Western Newspaper Union. Some companies also sent out press releases as boilerplate so that they had to be printed as written. The modern equivalent is the press release boilerplate, or boiler, a paragraph or two that describes the company and its products.
