A meme is a unit of culture that propagates by imitation from one mind to another — and, in the sense that now dominates, an image, video, or phrase copied and varied rapidly across the internet.
The word is a deliberate coinage. The evolutionary biologist 📝Richard Dawkins introduced it in the final chapter of 📝The Selfish Gene in 1976, arguing that culture requires a replicator of its own, analogous to the gene: "We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'." He shortened mimeme — from Greek mimeisthai, "to imitate" — to meme, noting it could equally be heard as related to memory or to the French même. Tunes, catchphrases, fashions, and techniques were his examples: things that leap from brain to brain and are subject to variation, selection, and differential survival.
The internet sense is recorded from around 1997 and narrows the original in one specific way. Dawkins's memes spread largely by unconscious imitation; internet memes are copied and altered on purpose, by people who know they are participating in a format. Circulating on 📝Reddit, 📝X (Twitter), 📝Instagram, and 📝Tiktok, they typically follow a cycle of creation, virality, remix, and exhaustion, though some formats persist for years. Although associated with humor, they also carry political expression, cultural critique, and group signaling — a meme's punchline is often a membership test. The academic field studying cultural transmission on Dawkins's model took the name memetics, which remains contested as a science even as the word it derives from has entered ordinary speech.