A meme is a unit of culture, such as a joke, image, phrase or behavior, that spreads by imitation. Richard Dawkins coined the word in 1976, and online it now usually means a remixable image, video or catchphrase.
The wider map of online communities and their habits sits in internet culture, and this page covers the meme itself: its origin, its meaning and how it is used today.
What does meme mean today?
The word “meme” carries a broad older meaning and a narrow newer one. The older sense, from 1976, describes any idea that copies itself from mind to mind. The newer sense, which took hold after 1993, describes a piece of online content that people copy, alter and repost. Wikipedia’s entry on internet memes opens by describing the original term as a “conceptual unit of cultural transmission, analogous to (and sounding like) the gene in biology.”
Both meanings share the same working parts. A meme needs a core idea, a way to be copied, and room for variation. A joke retold at different dinner tables is a meme in the broad sense. A captioned photo that strangers keep re-captioning is a meme in the narrow, internet sense. The same logic of copying with small errors applies to both. Over time the copies drift, and the versions that are easiest to remember or most fun to repeat crowd out the rest. That drift is visible in any long-running joke, where the oldest version is rarely the one people share today, and where each retelling adds or drops a detail depending on the audience in front of it. Researchers who study online memes treat these changes as data, because every altered copy leaves a timestamped trace that a spoken joke never leaves. The mechanics are identical: imitation, mutation and selection by what people find funny, true or useful.
The online sense is the one most readers mean today. An internet meme usually has a recognizable structure that stays fixed, such as a picture, a sound or a caption layout, and a slot that changes with each new version. That split between fixed structure and variable content is what the site’s explainer on meme format breaks down in detail, and it is why a single image can produce countless different jokes, each readable only because the audience already knows the original frame and can spot what was swapped in.
Not every popular post is a meme. A video that gets watched by many people but is never imitated is closer to a viral clip. The test most researchers use is participation: a meme invites copies, while a one-off hit invites only views. The difference between the two is covered in the page on the viral meme.
Where did the word meme come from?
The word first appeared in print in 1976, in The Selfish Gene, published by Oxford University Press in eleven chapters. Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, argued that evolution does not depend on the chemistry of DNA but on any self-replicating unit of transmission. For biology that unit is the gene. For culture he needed a new word.
He wrote that “‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’,” and then added: “I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.” The book went on to a second edition in 1989, a third in 2006 and a fourth in 2016, the last being The Extended Selfish Gene, a 40th-anniversary edition.
Dawkins did not claim the underlying idea was new. The Wikipedia entry on memes notes earlier relatives of the concept, including the term mneme, which also appears in Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the White Ant (1926), and the linguist Kenneth Pike’s 1954 pairing of “emic” and “etic” for insider and outsider views of behavior. Discussion of ideas facing evolutionary pressure goes back to the time of Charles Darwin.
Meme theory then split into two camps. One camp, led by Susan Blackmore, whose 1999 project Dawkins endorsed, treated memes as real replicators worth testing scientifically; her book The Meme Machine argued that religions are particularly tenacious memes. The other camp, which includes critics in the social sciences, questioned whether culture can be cut into discrete units at all. Blackmore herself points out that Beethoven’s symphonies make a good example of the difficulty, since nobody agrees where one musical meme ends and the next begins.
The neuroscience side stayed speculative. The psychologist Nicholas Humphrey suggested that memes should be seen as living structures “physically residing in the brain”, and the Wikipedia summary notes that developments in neuroimaging may eventually make empirical study possible. Until then, the strongest evidence for memes comes from the observable record of online copying rather than from the brain.
How did memes move online?
The internet label arrived in 1993, when Mike Godwin used the word for the way ideas proliferated through early message boards, Usenet groups and email. Godwin applied Dawkins’s term to the behavior he saw around him, and the usage stuck because the match was so close: online ideas copied, mutated and died off in public view.
Dawkins himself described the online usage as a “hijacking of the original idea”. By 2013, the researcher Limor Shifman had reworked his concept for online contexts, tying memes to the media that carry them rather than to a biological metaphor. Her approach let researchers measure memes by tracking real posts instead of arguing about mental units.
Early internet milestones
The Dancing Baby is often named as one of the first viral videos. The animated model came from the Character Studio plug-in for Autodesk’s animation software, released in August 1996, and the animator Ron Lussier recombined the pieces and posted a version to a mailing list. The Wikipedia entry records that the animation then appeared in the television drama Ally McBeal, in commercials and in music videos between 1997 and 1998. Unreal Pictures co-founder Michael Girard had earlier discarded the model, calling it “disturbing” for its realistic nature.
The lolcat shows the next stage. The word was in use by June 2006, and the domain lolcats.com was registered on June 14, 2006. The first image on the “I Can Has Cheezburger?” site was posted on January 11, 2007. Cats in captioned photos were not new: the British photographer Harry Pointer made cat carte de visite portraits in the early 1870s. What was new was the invention of a dialect and a template that anyone could reuse. The lolcat became the prototype of the image macro, a picture overlaid with large text. The American Dialect Society named “lolcat” a runner-up in its “Most Creative” category, and the caption syntax even inspired an esoteric programming language called LOLCODE.
Rickrolling arrived on 15 May 2007, when the 4chan user Shawn Cotter uploaded Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” video to YouTube and linked it in place of a trailer for the game Grand Theft Auto IV. The prank reached the mainstream in April 2008, after YouTube used it for an April Fools’ Day event and voters pushed the song in a poll for a New York Mets rally song. Astley was hesitant to embrace the joke and declined to appear at the 2008 MTV Europe Music Awards, where an online vote had named him “Best Act Ever.” A bait-and-switch link remains one of the longest-lived memes in the record.
Platform changes shaped each wave. YouTube, released in 2005, enabled video memes such as Rickrolling and the Harlem Shake. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram added fast sharing, and meme-generating websites lowered the effort needed to make one. After Vine shut down in 2017, the short-video network TikTok became the de facto replacement for short-form comedy. The page on meme lifecycle follows how a joke moves from a niche forum to a mass platform and then fades.
What kinds of memes exist?
Online memes fall into several broad families: image macros, reaction images, video clips, text and catchphrase memes, and the abstract genres known as dank or surreal memes. They differ in medium, but each follows the same rule of a stable frame and a changeable slot.
Image-based memes
Image macros dominated the era of lolcats. Other early image forms included demotivators, which parody motivational posters, plus photoshopped images, rage comics and anime fan art. The practical building block of most of these is the meme template, a blank base picture that users fill with new text. A template that is simple enough to be altered by any stranger becomes an exploitable meme, a format designed or discovered to be reused.
Video and short-form memes
Video memes grew with YouTube, then compressed further with Vine and TikTok. A Vine clip of a child answering “What’s Nine Plus Ten?” is one cited example of the short-video joke. These formats tend to rely on a sound, a gesture or a camera move that other users can reproduce, which makes them easier to imitate than a static picture.
Dank, surreal and deep-fried memes
Dank and surrealist memes are among the newer genres and reward insider knowledge. “Deep-fried” memes are images run through several filters or layers of lossy compression until they are distorted and oversaturated. The meme market emerged as a subculture that satirizes Wall Street by treating memes as stocks, and it began on Reddit as /r/MemeEconomy. Despite losing popularity since the late 2010s, dank memes have seen several revival attempts on TikTok. For a look at the community that produces much of this material, see the page on the reddit meme.
Language and slang
Memes also feed vocabulary. The Wikipedia entry on internet memes lists slang popular among Generation Alpha, such as “skibidi”, “rizz”, “gyatt”, “sigma” and “fanum tax”. Livestream communities generate a fast-moving dialect of their own, which the guide to stream slang tracks term by term. A phrase counts as a meme when it travels with a recognizable situation attached, not merely when it is a new word.
For examples of formats that have reached the widest audiences, the list of popular memes collects the best-known cases with dates and origins.
Why do memes matter beyond jokes?
On January 22, 2021, roughly 140 percent of GameStop’s public float had been sold short, according to the Wikipedia account of the GameStop short squeeze. Goldman Sachs analysts later noted that short interest above 100 percent of a company’s float had occurred only 15 times in the prior 10 years. The squeeze was triggered mainly by users of the subreddit r/wallstreetbets, and the episode gave the phrase “meme stock” its public meaning.
The story began as an online running joke. The investor Keith Gill, posting as u/DeepFuckingValue, shared regular updates on his position from January 2020. Another user, Stonksflyingup, posted a humorous explainer video on October 27, 2020. Gill said on January 29, 2021 that he “never expected what [had] happened over the last week”. Memes, in this case, carried a financial argument and a community identity at once, and they moved real money.
Marketing and accidental promotion
Brands and films also feel the effect. The “Most Interesting Man in the World” image macro was generated from an advertising campaign for the beer brand Dos Equis. The reverse also occurs: the film Snakes on a Plane became a cult classic after a law student created the website SnakesOnABlog.com, a promotion nobody at the studio planned. Because audiences decide which jokes spread, companies that try to force a meme often fail, and this site takes no part in selling products through them.
Quality, “brain rot” and AI slop
Critics now argue that the quality has dropped. The Wikipedia entry notes that newer low-quality internet memes are often classified as brain rot, AI slop, or both, and that memes once seen as lasting cultural artifacts now often convey trivial rather than meaningful ideas. The term “brain rot” refers to content lacking quality and meaning, and its name comes from the perceived negative psychological effects of exposure to it. That criticism is itself a claim about culture, and it is debated.
The same argument runs through the oldest meme research. If culture copies like genes, then the most copyable idea wins, whether or not it is the most accurate or valuable. Blackmore’s view that religions are tenacious memes and Dawkins’s worry about hijacked meaning point to the same question about what spreads and why.
How can someone make or study a meme?
Making a basic meme follows a short sequence: pick a frame that already has a shared meaning, change the slot so it fits a fresh situation, and post it where the audience already speaks the joke. The full walkthrough is in the guide on how to make a meme, and the step that most often goes wrong is the first, because a frame misread produces a joke that falls flat.
For study, the useful habit is to ask the questions the historical record answers. Who posted it first, and on which platform? What stayed fixed across copies, and what changed? When did it peak, and what ended it? Rickrolling shows an origin on 15 May 2007 and a peak in 2008, yet the entry on it calls it a “very long-lived meme,” which is a reminder that decline is not always final.
Source quality matters as well. Early meme history is full of unverifiable claims. The time of a lolcat’s first appearance was misdated in one major magazine until a correction based on reader evidence, and the origin date of any meme is often reconstructed rather than recorded. Reliable sources give a date, a platform and a named poster, and treat everything else as unconfirmed.
Frequently asked questions
Who invented the word meme?
Richard Dawkins coined it in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, published by Oxford University Press, as a shortened form of the Greek-rooted “mimeme” (The Selfish Gene).
When did meme start meaning an online joke?
Wikipedia credits Mike Godwin with applying the term to online content in 1993, in reference to ideas spreading across message boards, Usenet groups and email (Internet meme).
Is a viral video the same as a meme?
No. The Dancing Baby was one of the first viral videos in 1996, but it became a meme through reuse in other media between 1997 and 1998, including Ally McBeal (Dancing baby).
What was the first lolcat?
The term was in use by June 2006, and the “I Can Has Cheezburger?” site posted its first image on January 11, 2007, though cat photo novelties date to the early 1870s (Lolcat).
Can memes affect financial markets?
Yes. In the GameStop short squeeze, about 140 percent of the public float had been sold short by January 22, 2021, driven largely by r/wallstreetbets (GameStop short squeeze).
