meme

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for meme is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /miːm/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,170 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 6 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for meme, with forms such as "emme", "meem", and "memme". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "MM", "men", "mom", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Clipping of mimeme, equivalent to mime + -eme. Coined by British biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene. Shortened (after gene) from mimeme (compare English phoneme), anglicized as if from a noun derived from Ancient Greek μῑμέομαι (… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is meme, spelled M-E-M-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.