About SorryCopyPaste

Apologising by repetition is an old idea — the lines-on-a-blackboard thing. It survives because it works in a narrow way: a hundred identical lines says something a paragraph cannot, and it does it without giving the other person anything to argue with.

The tools that already existed for this were mostly single pages with a generator and a wall of filler text around it. They worked, but they had a problem we kept running into: the repeated text itself was not in the page. It was built by a script after you arrived, which meant it was invisible to search engines and useless if the script failed.

So we built the opposite. Every block on this site is written into the page as ordinary text at build time. You can select it, copy it, and read it with scripts turned off. The generator is there for when you want different options, not as the only way to get anything.

Every page here tries to answer a real question rather than pad a word count. That means some of it is advice you might not want: the 10,000-times page tells you plainly that the emoji version will not send, and the page for apologising to a partner says the repeated block on its own will not fix anything.

We think that is the right trade. A site that only tells you the tool is wonderful is not much use when you are trying to work out whether to send a hundred lines or a thousand, or whether to send anything at all.

If you spot something wrong — a character limit that has changed, a claim that does not hold up — the contact page has a way to tell us. Corrections get made.