RTFM
Abbreviation · Imperative · Hacker Culture · Origin: 1979
Definitions
Read The F***ing Manual — the universal, exasperated reply to a question that is clearly answered in the documentation. An enduring artifact of hacker culture's expectation that you try to help yourself first.
In plain English: A blunt way of telling someone to read the instructions before asking questions. Not polite, but a longstanding tradition in tech forums.
Origin Story
The oldest tech support response, delivered with varying degrees of politeness
**RTFM** — "Read The F***ing Manual" — dates to at least the 1950s military, where it was used by frustrated NCOs dealing with recruits who asked questions answered in their training manuals. The acronym migrated to computing culture through the overlap between military veterans and early computer professionals.
By the 1970s and 1980s, RTFM was standard Usenet vocabulary, often deployed (sometimes harshly) against newcomers who asked basic questions. The Jargon File (first compiled 1975) includes it, noting the polite expansion "Read The Fine Manual" for mixed company. Its close relative, **STFW** ("Search The F***ing Web"), emerged in the late 1990s as Google made self-service troubleshooting possible.
The culture around RTFM has evolved. Modern developer communities increasingly view "RTFM" responses as unwelcoming, especially to beginners. Stack Overflow's community guidelines explicitly discourage it. But the frustration it expresses — the desire for people to try before asking — remains universal, even if the expression has softened.
Coined by: Military culture (pre-computing)
Context: U.S. military, 1950s; computing adoption, 1970s
Fun fact: FreeBSD's documentation historically included the passage: 'We would like to welcome you to FreeBSD, and we will be happy to answer your questions. However, we do ask that you first try to find the answer in the documentation.' This is the most diplomatically phrased RTFM in open-source history.