Other forms: memes
A meme is a joke picture or format that spreads across the internet, remade endlessly. A meme about it, that meme is everywhere, meme culture.
The internet sense is the one everybody uses, and memes work by having a fixed form and swappable content — the joke is in the variation. It is pronounced meem, one syllable. The original scientific sense is broader: a meme is any unit of culture that spreads by imitation, which is what Richard Dawkins coined the word for. Note memetic and the verb to meme, which is now common.
1nounmemeA joke picture or format that spreads and is endlessly remade.
“The photo of the grumpy cat became a meme, with new captions added every day.”
2noununitA unit of culture that spreads by imitation.
“He wrote about the tune as a meme rather than a song.”
meme is something that spreads by copying.
Richard Dawkins coined meme in 1976 from Greek mimeisthai, to imitate, deliberately shaping it to rhyme with gene. He wanted a word for something that copies itself through culture the way a gene copies itself through bodies, which the internet then proved rather thoroughly.
Ancient Greek
μῑμέομαι
English, today
meme
Built from
Clipping of mimeme. a clipping of mimeme, equivalent to mime + eme. coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene. Shortened (after gene) from mimeme (compare English phoneme), anglicized as if from a noun derived from Ancient Greek μῑμέομαι with the deverbal suffix -μα, from μῖμος (“imitation, copy”). The concept was later applied to the Internet by Mike Godwin.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA