A meme (/miːm/; MEEM) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.

1. : an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media.

meme, unit of cultural information spread by imitation. The term meme (from the Greek mimema, meaning “imitated”) was introduced in 1976 by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his work The Selfish Gene.

Coined by the British evolutionist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976), a meme is a unit of culture—such as “tunes, ideas, catch‐phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches.” In humans, memes have supposedly taken over much of the evolutionary burden of the traditional units of ...