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Japanese students call a report and essay made up by only putting data downloaded from the Internet e.g. passages from Wikipedia put together without including their own thoughts or creative ideas, a “コピペ-Kopipe,” which is pronounced as 'kopipay.'

It is a compound of ‘copied + pasted + paper’. Incidentally ‘copy ,’ ‘paste,’ and ‘paper’ are all adapted to Japanese language, and pronounced as ‘kopi-i, ‘paisuto, and ‘paypah’.

To me 'Kopipe' is akin to plagiarism, but it doesn’t have the same criminal overtone as plagiarism itself. It seems to be just a labor-saving editing or blending job for students.

While riding on the train, I've overheard students say to each other:

“I submitted a report in time by ‘kopipeing’ articles”

innocently, as if they were playing a game.

Is there a similar student jargon or abbreviation for ‘Kopipe’ in English?

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    I don't know of any student jargon specific to plagiarizing papers, but "copypasta" is a similar term that refers to Internet content recirculated widely (usually without mentioning the original source).
    – Alex P
    Commented May 3, 2013 at 21:29
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    No. We just call them "papers", and assume they're copied unless proven otherwise.
    – John Lawler
    Commented May 3, 2013 at 21:55
  • @JohnLawler Plagiarism no longer triggers expulsion?
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented May 3, 2013 at 22:12
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    @Alex. Kopipe could be an imported and transformed form of ‘Copypasta,’ though I’m not sure.
    – Yoichi Oishi
    Commented May 3, 2013 at 22:16
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    The phenomenon could be called a plagiaristic short-cut. I've been known to throw an essay or two together by this method. Desperation triggered by the dual stressors of a blank page and a looming deadline can sometimes elicit desperate measures. Nevertheless, I at least cite my sources when using this method, so I guess it's not really plagiarism, just a total lack of originality and invention--not to mention desperation (as I've already indicated) and more than a little laziness, perhaps. In my defense, I at least insert some artful segues between the cut-and-pasted material!
    – rhetorician
    Commented May 4, 2013 at 2:43

2 Answers 2

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There is no special noun for that in English, but 'to copy' or 'to copy-paste' works, but is not jargon at all, it works for anything, whether plagiarized or reworked.

Plagiarizing from electronic articles is certainly a recognized phenomenon in English speaking cultures, but there is no noun, no special term for that class of objects.

One could refer to the situation in other ways, like

Did you get that off the internet?

I copy-pasted my paper from my friend.

He cobbled together his paper from wikipedia articles.

There are related terms: 'paper mill' where one can purchase a paper written by someone else on contract (the paper is said to be 'ghostwritten'). But there is no term for when one does the cut and paste onesself.

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  • I think just copied is what you want here, not anything more. Presenting someone else’s work as your own is a lie: fraud, plain and simple. It is dishonest in the extreme, and doing so in a university framework is especially deserving of severe chastisement, because it subverts the entire reason for being in school. We do not need new words for old evils — unless one perhaps wish to cloak said evil in some dismissive euphemism, as though it didn’t matter that you were a cheat. Whatever happened to “We will not lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does”? This is all three.
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented May 4, 2013 at 13:24
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    @tchrist: sure, that's a good cultural observation, but there is a term in Japanese, and since there are bizarre situations for which there are words in English, the OP could reasonably expect a term.
    – Mitch
    Commented May 4, 2013 at 13:41
  • What do you mean it is a cultural observation? Are you saying that the very same plagiaristic act of lying, cheating, and stealing is abhorrent in some cultures but accepted in certain others? Eww! Talk about cultural relativism!!
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented May 4, 2013 at 15:05
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    @tchrist: The OP is about a word, not about a phenomenon. Your 'no need for new words' may be right but that doesn't stop people from creating them, as it seems has been done in Japanese and so could easily happen in English.
    – Mitch
    Commented May 4, 2013 at 15:33
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The expression I've heard is "copypasta", meaning anything put together with nothing but cutting and pasting. The suggestion is that the result would be disorganized as a plate of spaghetti.

Sadly, there is no verb (as far as I know) for creating copypasta or for a person engaged in that activity.

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  • I've upvoted this answer because I checked online after seeing a question about copypasta, a term which I've never heard of until today. A little background info would have made this answer rock solid.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Apr 24, 2015 at 7:00
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    "Copypasta" has acquired a bit of a different connotation since this answer was written -- it's now frequently used to refer to a certain variety of textual Internet meme.
    – user89175
    Commented Nov 6, 2017 at 21:09

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