Copypasta is any chunk of text that people copy and paste into new conversations again and again, often as a joke, a bait post, or an ironic reply that has nothing to do with the thread it lands in2. The word itself is a portmanteau of "copy," "paste," and "pasta," which is roughly what "paste-a" sounds like when said out loud3.

Unlike spam, which is pumped out by bots and mail servers, copypasta spreads by hand3. Someone thinks a wall of text is funny, weird, or infuriating enough to save, then drops it into a new thread whenever the moment fits. The format has no fixed length or subject, so a copypasta can be a two-line one-liner, a rambling personal story, or a full essay written entirely in leetspeak.

Making a copypasta usually starts by finding a text post that reads funny out of context, then sharing it word for word into unrelated threads. Common conventions include preserving the original formatting, typos, and line breaks exactly, and dropping the paste into a conversation where it makes no sense to maximize the joke3. Some pastas are edited to swap in a target name or subject, but purists often insist on posting the original verbatim2.