Why boilerplate

Here's an example of Language for a Living Will from the website of the Attorney General of the State of Missouri a "Living Will" is "a document that allows an individual to express wishes for medical care if he or she is unable to speak for him or herself" :. Boilerplate is not restricted to legal contexts; you may use the term anywhere you are speaking of language which is more or less guaranteed to accomplish what it is supposed to.

For instance, much perhaps most computer code is such boilerplate. Your definition's reference to "news stories" refers to the once common practice of distributing news releases as pre-cast plates of type; unlike text, this could not be edited into a different form but could only be inserted, as-is, into a newspaper's press.

We need a small history lesson to explain how boilerplate came to be associated with legal language or news stories. When we used metal physical printing presses early 's you had to use metal sheets to create what you were going to print. Eventually, they started to make standard metal sheets plates out of a stronger metal for some writing that needed to be printed constantly.

The printing press workers started to call these standard plates "boilerplate" because they looked like the plates you saw on boilers. This is an example of a boilerplate from an old steam engine train,. Eventually the name migrated from the physical plate, to what was written inside it.

So any language that is standard enough to need to be repeated constantly is called boilerplate. Since in the past you would have made a 'boilerplate' of it to print on the old presses.

Manufacturing plate metal for boilers was done buy repeatedly folding the metal over and over. Once you finished one piece you start a new piece, folding it over just like the last piece. So you repeat the same process over and over making a new piece each time, but using the same basic process. So churning out the same thing over and over again became known as a boilerplate process. Sign up to join this community. These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'boilerplate.

Send us feedback. See more words from the same year. Accessed 12 Nov. More Definitions for boilerplate. See the full definition for boilerplate in the English Language Learners Dictionary. Britannica English: Translation of boilerplate for Arabic Speakers.

Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Save Word. Definition of boilerplate. Boilerplate in Print In the days before computers, small, local newspapers around the U. Whitmer to stand down. First Known Use of boilerplate , in the meaning defined at sense 1. These documents are typically not permitted for negotiations with clients and cutomers who generally sign without giving much importance to reading and understanding what exactly is written in them.

These boilerplate documents are often written by and prepared by parties having a superior power of bargaining and presented to weaker parties for adhesion contacts.

Having boilerplate language reduces the time and efforts that will have to be put in otherwise. These documents could be found across a variety of purposes across all industries. Boilerplate texts are generally a part of templates that can be quickly filled and personalised accordingly. Products IT. About us Help Center. Log In Where do you want to login? Sign Up. Income Tax Filing. Expert Assisted Services. Tax Saving.