A meme is an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person by imitation. Online, the word usually means an image, video or phrase that travels across the internet and gets changed along the way, often for a laugh.
The word is older than the internet, and it started in biology, not comedy. I've worked from Wikipedia and Dictionary.com for what follows.
Dawkins and The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist, coined the word in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In his sense, a meme is anything cultural that people pass on by copying each other. The examples he gave in the book were melodies, catchphrases, fashion and the technology of building arches.
None of those is a joke. A tune you can't stop humming counts, and so does a way of building an arch.
A word built to sound like gene
This is the detail I like most. Dictionary.com says meme is a shortening of an earlier Dawkins coinage, mimeme, which rests on a Greek word meaning imitation or copy. He trimmed it so it would sound like gene.
So the name carries both halves of the idea: copying from the Greek root, and the biology from the echo of gene. It's also why the word is said meem, to rhyme with team.
How the word moved online
Wikipedia credits Mike Godwin with the term Internet meme in 1993, when he described how memes spread through early online communities such as message boards and Usenet. Online bulletin boards are also where the word lurker had picked up its online meaning, in the mid-1980s, for people who read without posting.
Today, Wikipedia says, internet memes spread mainly through social media, as images, videos such as GIFs and other viral content. Dictionary.com's definition adds the part that makes the online version recognisable: it's often altered, creatively or for a joke, as it spreads.
Memes can date, too. Minion memes are one of the examples sources give of things people now call cheugy, slang for tastes that were cool once and aren't any more.
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When brands use memes
Wikipedia notes that using memes to promote products or services has been called memetic marketing, and gives Gucci's Instagram meme ads as an example. If you're weighing that up for your own brand, I've written about using memes in digital marketing, and there's a round-up of free meme templates if you'd like to try making one.
Meme questions people ask
Who invented the word meme?
Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene in 1976.
What does meme mean on the internet?
A cultural item such as an image, video or phrase that spreads online and is often altered in a creative or humorous way.
How do you pronounce meme?
It rhymes with team: meem.
Where does the word come from?
Dawkins shortened mimeme, which rests on a Greek word for imitation or copy, so it would sound like gene.
So, what counts as a meme?
Anything that spreads because people copy it. That's Dawkins's sense, and it still holds: a catchphrase your team keeps repeating is a meme as much as a reaction GIF is. For the online kind, I'd add one test from the Dictionary.com definition. If people aren't changing it as they pass it on, it's probably just a viral post.
