Graffiti is hardly a new development; impromptu inscriptions found on the walls of Pompeii and in the Navajo deserts of the American Southwest make that clear. Through the 1950s and 60s, sociologists studying graffiti went into public restrooms to decipher vulgar humor on stall walls. The graffiti that I discuss here, it should be understood, has no historical connection to that variant. Here, "graffiti" refers specifically to the products of a subculture that first developed in US cities in the 1970s, and has since spread throughout the world, in which youth write their names in ever-larger, more elaborate ways. Though the largest number of graffiti practitioners are still young teens who simply write a chosen "tag," or nickname, in spray paint, marker or other media, a small number of those go on to paint large, ambitious, multi-color murals based on a highly stylized design of their tag. It is on these muralists that I will focus. In keeping with the subculture surrounding this type of graffiti (sometimes called "graf," I do not use the singular graffito.

This definition is in context to Graffiti. See more contextual defintions for Graffiti.