Word of the Day

: April 23, 2011

meme

noun MEEM

What It Means

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

meme in Context

It is easy to fall prey to a meme that has been perpetuated by the mass media even without any evidence to support the original idea.

"The Internet-to-print projects usually happen swiftly, Boog noted, so the books are released before the Internet 'meme' - a concept that spreads online - loses the interest of fickle fans." -- From an article by Joseph Lord in The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky), April 3, 2011

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.’ I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate ‘mimeme’ to ‘meme.’" (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.”) "Meme" itself, like any good meme, caught on fairly quickly, spreading from person to person as it established itself in the language.