Definition
nounUnsolicited bulk electronic messages.
nounAny undesired electronic content automatically generated for commercial purposes.
Sentence Examples
Another spam article hoping for click-throughs?
The exposition “Buy Belarusian” was advertised using spam.
Word Origin & History
The original sense (canned ham) is a proprietary name registered by Geo. A. Hormel & Co. in U.S., 1937. It is presumed to be a conflation of either "spiced ham" or "shoulder of pork and ham" but was soon extended to other kinds of canned meat. Hormel spells the trademarked name in all upper case.
The use for unsolicited and unwanted email derives from a Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch. In the 1970 sketch, a group of Vikings in a restaurant repeatedly chant the word "spam". The earliest recorded real-life use for this sense occurs around 1993 which finds reference in a newsgroup post dated March 31, 1993, but the term may have been in use on "Multi-User Dungeons" (MUDs) in the 1980s.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result. If the bumf arrived electronically, the take-up rate was 0.1%. And for online adverts the “conversion” into sales was a minuscule 0.01%. That means about $165 billion was spent not on drumming up business, but on annoying people, creating landfill and cluttering spam filters."
— 2013 May 25, “No hiding place”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8837, page 74:
"Transformed by programming ineptitude into a monster of Frankenstein proportions, it broke loose on the night of March 31, 1993 and proceeded to spam news.admin.policy with something on the order of 200 messages in which it attempted, and failed, to cancel its own messages."
— 1993 March 31, Joel Furr, “ARMM: ARMM: >>>>Ad Infinitum”, in alt.folklore.computers (Usenet), message-ID :
"During World War II, of course, I ate my share of SPAM along with millions of other soldiers."
— 1966 June 29, Dwight D Eisenhower, Letter to Hormel Foods dated 29 June 1966: