It was a term used in printing presses for text/content that could be reused.
> "Boiler plate" originally referred to the rolled steel used to make boilers to heat water. Metal printing plates (type metal) used in hot metal typesetting of prepared text such as advertisements or syndicated columns were distributed to small, local newspapers, and became known as 'boilerplates' by analogy. One large supplier to newspapers of this kind of boilerplate was the Western Newspaper Union, which supplied "ready-to-print stories [which] contained national or international news" to papers with smaller geographic footprints, which could include advertisements pre-printed next to the conventional content.
The same can be true of boilerplate code, which in the same article is defined as
> the sections of code that have to be included in many places with little or no alteration
It was a term used in printing presses for text/content that could be reused.
> "Boiler plate" originally referred to the rolled steel used to make boilers to heat water. Metal printing plates (type metal) used in hot metal typesetting of prepared text such as advertisements or syndicated columns were distributed to small, local newspapers, and became known as 'boilerplates' by analogy. One large supplier to newspapers of this kind of boilerplate was the Western Newspaper Union, which supplied "ready-to-print stories [which] contained national or international news" to papers with smaller geographic footprints, which could include advertisements pre-printed next to the conventional content.
The same can be true of boilerplate code, which in the same article is defined as
> the sections of code that have to be included in many places with little or no alteration