memory

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experience.
2. n. The act or an instance of remembering; recollection: spent the afternoon lost in memory.
3. n. All that a person can remember: It hasn't happened in my memory.
4. n. Something remembered: pleasant childhood memories.
5. n. The fact of being remembered; remembrance: dedicated to their parents' memory.
6. n. The period of time covered by the remembrance or recollection of a person or group of persons: within the memory of humankind.
7. n. Biology Persistent modification of behavior resulting from an animal's experience.
8. n. Computer Science A unit of a computer that preserves data for retrieval.
9. n. Computer Science Capacity for storing information: two gigabytes of memory.
10. n. Statistics The set of past events affecting a given event in a stochastic process.
11. n. The capacity of a material, such as plastic or metal, to return to a previous shape after deformation.
12. n. Immunology The ability of the immune system to respond faster and more powerfully to subsequent exposure to an antigen.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The mental capacity of retaining unconscious traces of conscious impressions or states, and of recalling these traces to consciousness with the attendant perception that they (or their objects) have a certain relation to the past; in a narrower sense, the power of such retention alone, the power or act of recalling being termed recollection. The application of the term is often extended, with more or less of figurativeness, to analogous physical processes.
2. n. The fact of retaining such mental impressions; remembrance; mental hold on the past; retrospect; recollection.
3. n. Length of time included in the conscious experience or observation of an individual, a community, or any succession of persons; the period of time during which the acquisition of knowledge is possible.
4. n. The state of being remembered; continued presence in the minds or thoughts of men; retained or perpetuated knowledge; posterior note or reputation: as, to celebrate the memory of a great event.
5. n. That which is remembered; anything fixed in or recalled to the mind; a mental impression; a reminiscence: as, pleasant memories of travel.
6. n. That which brings to mind; a memento or memorial; a remembrancer.
7. n. Commemoration; perpetuation of the knowledge of anything; a recalling to mind: as, a monument erected in memory of a person.
8. n. An act or ceremony of remembrance; a service for the dead: same as commemoration, 2 .
9. n. = Syn. 1-4. Memory, Recollection, Remembrance, Reminiscence. Memory is the general word for the faculty or capacity itself; recollection and remembrance are different kinds of exercise of the faculty; reminiscence, also, is used for the exercise of the faculty, but less commonly, and then it stands for the least energetic use of it, the matter seeming rather to be suggested to the mind. The correctness of the use of memory for that which is remembered has been disputed. The others are freely used for that which is remembered. In either sense, recollection implies more effort, more detail, and more union of objects in wholes, than remembrance. Reminiscence is used chiefly of past events, rarely of thoughts, words, or scenes, while recollection is peculiarly appropriate for the act of recalling mental operations. See remember.
10. n. Memory as mediated by kinesthetic images in the narrower sense.

Wiktionary

1. n. uncountable The ability of an organism to record information about things or events with the facility of recalling them later at will.
2. n. A record of a thing or an event stored and available for later use by the organism.
3. n. computing The part of a computer that stores variable executable code or data (RAM) or unalterable executable code or default data (ROM).
4. n. The time within which past events can be or are remembered.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. The faculty of the mind by which it retains the knowledge of previous thoughts, impressions, or events.
2. n. The reach and positiveness with which a person can remember; the strength and trustworthiness of one's power to reach and represent or to recall the past.
3. n. The actual and distinct retention and recognition of past ideas in the mind; remembrance.
4. n. The time within which past events can be or are remembered.
5. n. Something, or an aggregate of things, remembered; hence, character, conduct, etc., as preserved in remembrance, history, or tradition; posthumous fame.
6. n. obsolete A memorial.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. an electronic memory device
2. n. something that is remembered
3. n. the cognitive processes whereby past experience is remembered
4. n. the area of cognitive psychology that studies memory processes
5. n. the power of retaining and recalling past experience