meme

noun

ˈmēm 

1

: an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media

… the band encouraged fans to make memes to advertise the U.S. release of their EP …

—William Gruger

The grumpy cat meme frowned its way onto the Internet in September 2012 and never turned its dissatisfied head back. Since then, the image of the cranky cat has grown more and more popular in direct proportion to appearing less and less impressed by fame.

—Anastasia Thrift

2

: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

Memes (discrete units of knowledge, gossip, jokes and so on) are to culture what genes are to life. Just as biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest genes in the gene pool, cultural evolution may be driven by the most successful memes.

—Richard Dawkins

memetic

mē-ˈme-tik  mə- 

adjective

… the exhibition seeks to give a sense not only of Holmes's origins but of the real-world milieu in which Conan Doyle set him and of his memetic spread through the culture.

—Sam Leith

Did you know?

In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, British scientist Richard Dawkins defended his newly coined word meme, which he defined as "a unit of cultural transmission." Having first considered, then rejected, mimeme, he wrote: "Mimeme comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene." (The suitable Greek root was mim-, meaning "mime" or "mimic." The English suffix -eme indicates a distinctive unit of language structure, as in grapheme, lexeme, and phoneme.) Like any good meme, meme caught on and evolved, eventually developing the meaning known to anyone who spends time online, where it's most often used to refer to any one of those silly captioned photos that the Internet can't seem to get enough of.

Examples of meme in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Follow Di Placido for more meme explainers, television reviews, film theories and deep dives into digital culture. —Dani Di Placido, Forbes.com, 14 Apr. 2025

The memes are endless as the LIV Golf star has played awful golf on Sunday. —Thomas G. Moukawsher, MSNBC Newsweek, 13 Apr. 2025

Instead, it’s sparked backlash, internet memes and questions about the city's priorities. —Jasmine Baehr, FOXNews.com, 12 Apr. 2025

At the same time, the internet was having a field day with another stalwart of Japanese anime, deploying generative AI to infuse famous memes, family portraits and movie scenes with a patina of cuteness by recasting them in the style of the Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli. —Yii-Jan Lin, The Conversation, 11 Apr. 2025

Word History

Etymology

alteration of mimeme, from mim- (as in mimesis) + -eme

First Known Use

1976, in the meaning defined at sense 2

Phrases Containing meme

• meme stock

Rhymes for meme

• beam
• bream
• cream
• creme
• deem
• dream
• gleam
• ream
• scheme
• scream
• seam
• seem

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Kids Definition

meme

noun

ˈmēm

: an amusing or interesting item (as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media