A "supercut" is a tightly-edited montage of short video clips organized around a theme, often a recurring word, phrase, or trope from film or TV. (But really, a supercut can be made from anything.)

In April 2008, I coined the term in a blog post on my site, Waxy.org, with the help of my friend Ryan Gantz. The name stuck. Since then, supercuts have appeared in countless places, including This American Life, the New York Times, Wired, Time, and many more.

It can now be found in most dictionaries, including the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, and Dictionary.com. There's also a Wikipedia entry devoted to the subject.

In 2017, Lorde released "Supercut" on her second album, Melodrama, using supercuts as a metaphor for a relationship remembered as a highlight reel of its best moments. The Verge interviewed me about it, and Lorde thanked me on Twitter, which was pretty fun.

Far from an internet-era invention, there's a long history of supercuts in art and media that predates the coinage. I wrote a bit about the proto-history of the supercut, its growing use for political criticism, and some analysis of my supercut database back in 2011, following Tom McCormack's excellent post for Moving Image Source.

But nothing can beat Max Tohline's A Supercut of Supercuts: Aesthetics, Histories, Databases from 2021, a brilliant feature-length investigation into the supercut and the origins of compilation-based editing. Highly, highly recommended.

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