Why Does ‘Boilerplate’ Mean “Standard”?

You can find boilerplate everywhere from computer code to legal contracts. It’s any standard text copied repeatedly, as opposed to new text written for one place or purpose. This definition of boilerplate originated in newspaper publishing—but ironically, the term itself was copied from elsewhere.

1. The Original Boilerplate
2. Boilerplate Goes Beyond Syndicates

The Original Boilerplate

In the late 19th century, newspaper syndicates like the McClure Newspaper Syndicate and Western Newspaper Union were founded to distribute articles, serialized fiction, and various other kinds of content to local U.S. newspapers. The text was inscribed on flat metal plates that looked like boiler plates—metal sheets used to manufacture the shells of steam boilers—so they became known as boiler plates (now usually written with no space or hyphen), too.

The syndicate system did not come without controversy. Because boilerplate copy (also called “plate matter”) arrived ready to publish, printers didn’t have to do the time-consuming manual typesetting that regular copy required. This saved publishers money at the expense of the printers themselves, who had less work to do and so earned less. The Oakland Typographical Union of California went so far as to organize a boycott of the Oakland Enquirer over its use of boilerplate in 1891.

Others argued that innovations like boilerplate were simply how society advanced, and printers were fighting a losing battle by trying to stop it. “The tendency of the times is to furnish cheap reading, the same as other things, and if a community of limited patronage demands a paper, we see no reason why carefully selected matter, in a cheap form, cannot be used,” California’s Santa Monica Outlook wrote in 1890. “If a matter is good, why, it is good, let it appear in whatever form it may.”

And some of the matter definitely was good: McClure disseminated work by Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, J.M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and more literary heavy-hitters. But newspapers that relied on boilerplate didn’t always favor quality over quantity. “In newspaper offices they saw off boiler-plate just as a man saws wood. It comes by the yard, the treatment is merely a question of length; everything goes,” Montana’s Anaconda Standard wrote in 1893. “In this way, not by natural selection but as the result of sheer luck, our contemporaries manage, now and then, to get a really good item in their boiler-plate columns.”

Boilerplate Goes Beyond Syndicates

By the early 20th century, people had started using boilerplate to describe any standardized (and often widely distributed) text. The term frequently cropped up in reference to politicians’ sending the same material to publications across the country. In 1902, for example, a Pennsylvania newspaper reported that the Democratic Editorial Association chairman “was criticized for the insipid character of the ‘boiler-plate’ stuff his press bureau has been furnishing to the country organs of the party.”

The negative connotation of boilerplate in that quote was par for the course at the time. Boilerplate copy wasn’t just widespread; it was also often considered hackneyed and dull. Which makes sense—it’s hard for something to seem original and inspired if it’s everywhere. 

Boilerplate is still sometimes used to that effect today. More often, though, it truly just means “standard text.” Lawyers, publicists, software programmers, and plenty of other people rely on boilerplate for efficiency’s sake. It would be a massive waste of time for a publicist to write a new company overview for every press release they send out; or for a programmer to create a new section of code that functions exactly the same way as already-written code. Forgoing boilerplate would be—to borrow a bit of boilerplate—like reinventing the wheel.

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