The junk-email term “spam” took its name from a word used in a Monty Python sketch.
The source is the 1970 “Spam” sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Set in a café, it features a menu in which nearly every dish contains Spam, the canned meat product. As the waitress repeatedly recites the word, Viking customers drown out the conversation by singing “Spam” again and again.
That repetition became a metaphor for unwanted online material. In early online communities, users posted the word “spam” repeatedly to overwhelm conversations or push other messages off the screen. The term later broadened to describe excessive or irrelevant posting on Usenet and then unsolicited bulk email.
A common mix-up is assuming that the internet meaning came directly from the food brand or from an acronym. It did not: the modern computing sense is generally traced to the sketch’s deliberately overwhelming repetition. Hormel, the food’s maker, has nevertheless acknowledged and embraced the cultural association.