The term "image macro" originated on the Something Awful forums.[2] The name derived from the fact that the "macros" were a short bit of text a user could enter that the forum software would automatically parse and expand into the code for a pre-defined image.[2] This, in turn, related to the computer science concept of a macro; "a rule or pattern that specifies how a certain input sequence (often a sequence of characters) should be mapped to an output sequence (also often a sequence of characters) according to a defined procedure".