Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.
Wiktionary
- n. philosophy Any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.
- n. philosophy A self-propagating unit of cultural evolution having a resemblance to the gene (the unit of genetics).
- n. Internet, slang A quiz or survey that is copied from one webpage or online journal to another, each participant filling in his or her personal answers.
- n. Internet, slang A thought, idea, joke, or concept that spreads online, often virally. Can be in the form of image, a video, an email, an animation, or music.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one person to another by non-genetic means (as by imitation)
Etymologies
- Coined by Richard Dawkins, 1976 in the book, The Selfish Gene. Modelled after gene, from Ancient Greek μίμημα (mimema, "imitation, copy"), influenced by memory and French même ("same"). (Wiktionary)
- Shortening (modeled on gene) of mimeme, from Greek mimēma, something imitated, from mimeisthai, to imitate; see mimesis. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme* If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word meme.”
The Volokh Conspiracy » Recovering the lost English language:
“When Richard Dawkins coined the word meme he spoke about a soup of human culture where cultural units leap from brain to brain by processes of interpretation and imitation.”
The Huffington Post: Rajiv Naresh: Meme Wars and the Death of the Underground
“Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme, helping found the field of memetics.”
“Note: Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera says he doesn't think that the term meme-tracker defines any kind of meaningful category of products, and that the word is”
“What makes it a meme is the corollary that the F-22 is militarily irrelevant.”
“It's not a meme, before anyone uses the term, as a meme is an idea that develops and mutates.”
Is MacHeist's Tweetblast an example of how advertisers will destroy Twitter?
“My quote would have been, "do they have to ask you for your papers in a German accent?". aff it wasn't just snl ... the meme is all over the interwebs. still, it's funny.”
“For what a meme is and the rules that go along with it, check out my last meme post here.”
“Anyway, perhaps this meme is my chance to come up with two slightly alternate universe updates for my old high school classmates, twenty-one years late.”
“This strikes me as funny, because the only other person I read who has done this meme is an atheist!”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘meme’.
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Interesting words
A list of words that are odd or words that I have looked up.
concupiscence, brize, scree, scoria, forestaff, spanaemia, valetudinarianism, distasture, pyrethrum, laudanum, gentian, bicameral and 11184 more...
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INTERP - terminology management terms
Terms from the fields of terminology, lexicography, lexicology and corpus linguistics
reworder, rewording, parser, parsing, tagger, tagging, aligner, aligning, content analysis, content analyzer, corpus management, glossary and 546 more...
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EN - newSPEAK
Buzzwords of our time
actionable, administrivia, advermation, agreeance, backbone provider, back-sourcing, baked in, bandwidth, barn raising, Barneyware, belly-buttons, Below Zeros and 1076 more...
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Words build meanings from origins( et...
These come from gamma meditation ,I think.
discursive, exogenous, machinations, purportedly, sumptuous, congruity, cantankerous, incongruous, festoon, hessian, ratiocinative, stratigraphic and 2046 more...
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New and Unholy Coinage
21st century coinage. Any strange words you`ve seen on TV or heard from irritating young people.
hateration, holleration, chillax, weaksauce, pimpin', hella, meme, blamin, propagandhi, jazzercise, blog, social lubricant and 58 more...
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Vocabulary
shibboleth, verboten, jejune, ostensible, multifarious, quintessence, purportedly, tangential, vacillate, quagmire, wanton, onerous and 74 more...
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mots justes
No true synonyms, no other word will do.
dysphemism, nyehre, conflate, onomatopœic, galumph, zeitgeist, mercenary, theomeny, git, snarky, sass, smarmy and 46 more...
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Culture Jamming
appropriate, subvertise, adbust, detournement, carnivalesque, remix, mashup, critical, protest, subvertisement, adbusting, disrupt and 47 more...
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Web Words to Know
Neologisms, portmanteau, and adapted words that pertain to the internet and technology.
blog, collective intell..., crowdsourcing, flash mob, follow friday, google, groundswell, hash tag, lifecasting, lurker, mashup, meme and 15 more...
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redditum vocabularum
Words sometimes have a different meaning on reddit.
trees, ents, bacon?redditor, ent, tree, trees, bacon, upvote, downvote, gold, reddit, subreddit, AMA, IAMA and 14 more...
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Fandom words
Words that have meaning (or new meaning) because of fandom.
slash, het, drabble, canon, ship, spoiler, wank, lemon, bnf, weeaboo, woobie, fanon and 2 more...
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EN - autological words and phrases
Words and phrases expressing a property which they also possess themselves: "noun" is a noun, "English" is English, etc. If W means W AND W is (a) W, then W is an autological item. Very often but n...
noun, polysyllabic, abbrv., word, common, English, lovely, sesquipedalian, heterological, short, term, terminus technicus and 63 more...
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Interesting
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Tech Words to Know
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Worthy Wordie
words learnt from the Internet
unthink, meme, logophile, netiquette, onomatopoeia, singularity, oed, johnson's dictionary, man friday, lewis carroll, ontology, pro bono and 143 more...
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words I love to use
kerfuffle, smarmy, sketchy, grim, wheedle, piffle, prattle, loggerheads, snarky, piddling, nix, caterwaul and 90 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for meme.
dontcry I don't use it all the time -- just as often as appropriate. I find it quite handy. Mar 6, 2009
chained_bear Not a fan of it myself... till I saw this. Mar 6, 2009
dimã©lion not a fan of this word. Nov 16, 2008
immerbeta Dan Dennett talked about memes and dangerous ideas at TED 2002 Sep 21, 2008
colleen :D Sep 22, 2007
npydyuan Whoops: delayed page refresh. Uselessness beat me to the reference recognition comment.
*cool points demerit* Sep 22, 2007
npydyuan Inconceivable! Sep 22, 2007
uselessness You mean like people who say meme all the time, and don't really know what it means? Why, that would be absolutely, totally, and in all other ways, inconceivable. Sep 22, 2007
colleen Actually, 82, I thought memesta was clever! I'm absolutely in favor of madeupical words, as John says -- my issue is with the people who... how to put it? I think I must turn to the words of a man greater than I: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Sep 22, 2007
reesetee Widespread Misuse. Good band name. ;-) Sep 21, 2007
82times oh, meem, of course. there is no question about that. i'm just hoping i'm not part of the "widespread misuse." :! Sep 21, 2007
john Dissed why, because you coined a variant? Madeupical words are encouraged. I imagine colleen will be ok with memesta, as long as it's pronounced meemsta as opposed to, say, rhyming with lunesta :-) Sep 21, 2007
uselessness How do you say it? Sep 21, 2007
82times i feel like i just got dissed. Sep 21, 2007
colleen the widespread misuse of this term on the web is probably a meme unto itself.
and pronounced, I believe, as meem. not mehm, not mimi, people: meem.
oh, so many rants, so little time... Sep 21, 2007
seanahan Coined by Richard Dawkins. Sep 21, 2007