mimeme means A unit of mimetic information. It carries an Arena rating of 1347, earned across 22 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, mimeme ranks #198 of 17,151 for The Improbable, #970 of 17,140 for Most Whimsical Words, #4,049 of 17,143 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #4,113 of 17,163 for Funniest Words.
Why “mimeme” is a great word
A unit of mimetic information, proposed as the theoretical basis for a cultural replicator analogous to a gene. From Ancient Greek μῖμος (mîmos, "imitation, copy") with the deverbal suffix -μα (-ma), forming μίμημα (mīmēma, "imitated thing"); Anglicized and analyzed as mime + -eme. Coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins as the source for the shortened form 'meme'. Unlike "gene," a discrete packet of biological heredity, or "meme," its wildly successful shorthand offspring denoting any viral idea or image, a *mimeme* is the theoretical atom of imitation itself—the primal handshake, the original folk tune hummed across a fire, the first time a child copies a parent's frown. It is the silent, structural hum beneath the deafening noise of what spreads.
Etymology
Anglicized as if from a noun derived from Ancient Greek μῑμέομαι (mīméomai) with the deverbal suffix -μα (-ma), from μῖμος (mîmos, “imitation, copy”). By surface analysis, mime + -eme.
noun
- A unit of mimetic information.e.g.“Speech learning is a mimetic process. The linguistic signal is a ‘mimeme’.” — 1955, Leonard Robert Palmer, Achaeans and Indo-Europeans: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered Before the University of Oxford on 4 November 1954, page 8:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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