What Is a Meme?
A meme is a unit of culture that spreads by imitation. Richard Dawkins coined the word in 1976 for ideas that replicate like genes; online it now means a captioned image, video or catchphrase that people copy and remix across social platforms.
Where the word meme came from
Dawkins was an evolutionary biologist writing a book about genes, and near the end of it he needed a name for a second kind of replicator: something that copies itself through human culture the way a gene copies itself through bodies. He built the word by amputation.
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.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976
The Greek root behind it means, roughly, that which is imitated. Dawkins noted the new word also echoes memory, and the French même. The examples he gave were tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Not one of them is a picture with text on it.
The dated milestones you can check for yourself:
- 1976 — The Selfish Gene is published by Oxford University Press. Chapter 11 introduces the meme as a new replicator.
- 1990 — Mike Godwin seeds Godwin’s Law onto Usenet, explicitly as an experiment in memetics: an idea built to spread.
- 1994 — Godwin writes Meme, Counter-meme for Wired. It is one of the earliest uses of the word to describe media spreading through the internet specifically, rather than through culture in general.
- 1998 — Merriam-Webster enters meme, in an update to the tenth edition of its Collegiate Dictionary.
- 2007 to 2008 — Know Your Meme begins as a recurring segment in the Rocketboom daily weblog on 5 September 2007, becomes a standalone video series that December, and gains the searchable database in December 2008.
- 20 June 2013 — Dawkins opens the Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase at Cannes Lions with a piece called Just for Hits, in which he describes the word as having been hijacked by the internet.
That 2013 appearance matters more than it looks, because he did not simply complain. He drew the distinction most definitions still miss: a Dawkins meme mutates by accident, through copying error, the way a gene does. An internet meme mutates on purpose, because a person sits down and deliberately changes it. Deliberate human creativity is the variable his original model did not have.
If what you actually want is the name of one particular meme you have seen, that is a different job with different tools — we walk through it on how to identify a meme you cannot name.
What meme actually means
Merriam-Webster now carries both senses side by side. The first is the Dawkins one: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture. The second is the one most people mean: an amusing or interesting item, such as a captioned picture or video, or a genre of such items, that is spread widely online especially through social media.
| Dimension | Dawkins sense (1976) | Internet sense (current) |
|---|---|---|
| What replicates | Any unit of culture — a tune, a fashion, a technique | A specific image, clip, phrase or template |
| How it changes | Accidental mutation through imperfect copying | Deliberate edits by people trying to make it funnier |
| Where it lives | Human brains and behaviour | Files on servers, reposted and re-uploaded |
| How success is judged | Survival in the culture over years or centuries | Engagement over days or weeks |
| Example from the source | Ways of making pots or of building arches | A captioned picture or video spread through social media |
Neither sense is wrong. They answer different questions, and almost every argument about whether something counts as a meme turns out to be an argument about which of the two senses is in play.
How people actually use it
In practice meme is an umbrella word, and people reach for something more precise when precision matters. Four terms do most of the work, and they are not interchangeable.
| Term | What it is | How to spot it |
|---|---|---|
| Image macro | A picture with text laid over it, typically one line at the top and one at the bottom | Bold white text with a heavy black outline; the dominant meme shape of the 2000s |
| Reaction image | A still posted in place of a written reply, to convey a feeling | Posted alone as a comment, frequently with no added text at all |
| Catchphrase | The wording itself, which travels independently of any picture | Survives when the image is swapped out or dropped entirely |
| Format or template | The reusable structure: the layout, plus the roles inside it | You can relabel the parts and get a brand new joke without touching the image |
Distracted Boyfriend is the cleanest worked example of a format, because every stage of it is documented. The photograph was taken by Antonio Guillem and uploaded to the stock library iStock on 1 November 2015, captioned as a disloyal man with his girlfriend looking at another girl. People began labelling the three figures at the start of 2017, and it went viral in August 2017. Guillem told The Guardian later that month that he had not known what a meme was until recently. The picture itself never changed. Only the labels did, and that is precisely what makes it a format rather than a single joke.
The same distinction explains why an image macro is a type of meme and not a synonym for one. A meme can be a phrase with no picture, a video with no text, a dance, or a way of typing. What all of them share is the thing Dawkins actually specified: they get copied.
What we do not know
- There is no agreed first internet meme. The 1994 Wired piece is among the earliest uses of the word in the online sense, which is a claim about vocabulary rather than about the first thing that spread. Anyone naming a single first meme is choosing a definition, not reporting a fact.
- The dictionary timeline is muddier than it looks. Merriam-Webster dates its entry for meme to a 1998 update, yet press coverage in May 2015 listed meme among roughly 1,700 newly added words. The likeliest reading is that the internet sense arrived in 2015 while the Dawkins sense had been there since 1998, but we have not confirmed that directly.
- Page numbers vary by edition. Chapter 11 sits at different pages across printings and later editions, so any page citation you see should name which edition it refers to.
- Memetics never settled. The attempt to build a research programme on the meme analogy did not become a mainstream field, and how seriously it should be taken is still disputed. We are not aware of one authoritative account of why it stalled.
- The core quantity is unmeasured. There is no accepted unit of a meme, no way to count copies held in brains, and no fidelity metric. That gap is the standard objection to memetics, and it has not been closed.
Frequently asked questions
Who invented the word meme?
Richard Dawkins, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. He shortened the Greek root mimeme, meaning that which is imitated, down to one syllable so that it would sound a bit like gene.
What does meme mean in simple terms?
Something people copy. In the original sense it is any unit of culture passed on by imitation. In the internet sense it is a picture, video, phrase or template that spreads and gets remixed online.
Is a meme just a funny picture?
No. A funny picture becomes a meme only once other people copy it, relabel it or reuse the layout. Spread by imitation is the requirement, not humour, and plenty of memes are phrases or videos with no picture involved.
How do you pronounce meme?
As one syllable, meem, rhyming with cream. Dawkins chose that shape on purpose so the new word would sound a bit like gene.
What is the difference between a meme and a viral video?
A viral video spreads as itself, unchanged. A meme spreads by being changed, whether recaptioned, relabelled, reshot or quoted. A clip can be both, but going viral on its own does not make something a meme.
What is an image macro?
A picture with text superimposed on it, usually one line at the top and one at the bottom. It was the dominant meme shape of the 2000s, and it is one type of meme rather than a synonym for the word.
Did Richard Dawkins object to internet memes?
At a 2013 event at Cannes he said the word had been hijacked by the internet. His point was technical rather than hostile: his memes mutate through accidental copying error, whereas internet memes are mutated deliberately by people.
When did meme enter the dictionary?
Merriam-Webster dates its entry to a 1998 update of the tenth edition of the Collegiate Dictionary, about twenty-two years after the word was coined. The internet meaning is listed as a separate second sense.
Make a what is a meme
Load a blank canvas or your own image, add the caption, drag it where you want it, and download. Nothing is uploaded — the editor draws in your browser.
Drag any line on the image to move it.