A spoiler alert is a short notice placed before a piece of writing or speech to warn that what follows will reveal a plot twist, ending or other surprise. It gives the reader or listener the chance to stop before the detail is given away. The phrase is used constantly online, in reviews, forum posts and social media, wherever someone wants to discuss a film, book or television series in detail without ruining it for people who haven’t caught up yet.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘spoiler alert’?
The word at the heart of the phrase, “spoiler”, is generally traced to a piece by Doug Kenney in the April 1971 issue of National Lampoon, titled “Spoilers”, which listed the endings of well-known films and novels. Kenney presented the article as a sarcastic public service, one that supposedly “saves time and money” by telling readers how things turned out before they got there.
The phrase “spoiler alert” itself came later, out of early online discussion groups. Searching Usenet archives on Google Groups, the earliest known use has been traced to a 1982 posting about the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The linguist Ben Zimmer has confirmed this same 1982 posting as the first appearance of the phrase, and notes that he recalls spoiler alerts as an established convention on Usenet from the late 1980s, particularly on newsgroups devoted to puzzles, such as rec.puzzles, where giving away a solution too soon was treated as bad manners.
From these puzzle and film discussion groups, the convention of flagging plot-revealing text with the words “spoiler alert” spread across the wider internet as forums, review sites and eventually social media adopted the same habit. What began as a piece of newsgroup etiquette, a polite heads-up before ruining someone’s solution to a puzzle or someone’s enjoyment of a twist ending, became a standard fixture of how people talk about stories in public, whether they are reviewing a new release or simply warning a friend before discussing last night’s episode.