Other forms: memories
A memory is a moment from the past that your mind has kept. The smell of your grandmother's kitchen, the day the dog got out and you ran the whole street after it, a birthday cake with the wrong name piped on top.
Memory is also the machine and not only the moment: a good memory for faces, a poem learned from memory, an old man whose memory is going. Computers borrowed the word for the chips that hold what a program is using right now, which is why memory and storage are two different numbers on a phone. Watch one trap: in English a memory lives in your head, and the little painted plate you carry home is a souvenir. The plural does the everyday work — happy memories, childhood memories, memories of a place you will not see again. And a bench by the sea carries in memory of, which is how English keeps the dead present.
1nounmemorySomething you remember from the past.~2%
“I have one clear memory of that summer: the smell of hot tar.”
2nounabilityThe ability to remember things.~64%
“His memory for names is terrible.”
3nouncomputerThe part of a computer that holds data while it is working.~32%
“The program needs more memory than this laptop has.”
4noundeadThe way a dead person is remembered.~2%
“The garden was planted in memory of her mother.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
memory is a mental record of the past.
Latin memoria meant both the power of remembering and a written account of what happened, and it grew from memor, mindful. Behind that lies the Proto-Indo-European root (s)mer-, to remember, which also fed Greek merimna, care or thought, and mermeros, anxious — old proof that remembering and worrying live close together. English already had ġemynd for this idea; it drifted away and became mind.
Proto-Indo-European
*(s)mer-
Latin
memoria — the faculty of remembering, remembrance, memory, a historical account
Old French
memoire
Anglo-Norman
memorie
English, today
memory
Built from
From Anglo-Norman memorie, Old French memoire etc., from Latin memoria (“the faculty of remembering, remembrance, memory, a historical account”), from memor (“mindful, remembering”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)mer- (to remember), related to Ancient Greek μνήμη (“memory”) μέρμερος (“anxious”), μέριμνα (“care, thought”), Old English ġemimor (“mindful, remembering”). More at mimmer. a doublet of memoir and memoria. Displaced native myne (whence English min) and ġemynd, which took on a different meaning as modern mind.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA