Origins
The word 'meme' has had two lives. In its first, it was an academic concept in evolutionary biology. In its second, it became one of the defining words of internet culture. Remarkably, the two senses are not as far apart as they might seem.
Richard Dawkins coined 'meme' in 'The Selfish Gene,' published in 1976. The book's central argument was that the fundamental unit of natural selection is the gene — a replicator that copies itself from generation to generation, subject to variation and selection. In the book's final chapter, Dawkins proposed that culture also has replicators: ideas, behaviors, styles, and skills that copy themselves from brain to brain through imitation. He needed a word for this cultural replicator.
Dawkins took Ancient Greek 'μίμημα' (mīmēma), meaning 'that which is imitated,' from the verb 'μιμεῖσθαι' (mīmeisthai, 'to imitate'). He shortened it to 'meme' for three reasons: to make it a monosyllable, to make it rhyme with 'gene' (reinforcing the analogy), and to suggest French 'même' (meaning 'same'), since a meme replicates by remaining recognizably the same as it passes from person to person. The Greek root also produced 'mime' (an imitator), 'mimesis' (the act of imitation, central to Aristotle's theory of art), and 'mimic.'
Development
Dawkins's examples of memes included tunes, catchphrases, fashions, pot-making techniques, and religious ideas — anything that could be transmitted from one mind to another through imitation. He argued that memes, like genes, are subject to natural selection: they compete for limited resources (human attention and memory), they mutate as they are transmitted imperfectly, and the most successful variants — the catchiest tunes, the most compelling ideas — replicate most widely.
The concept sparked an entire academic field, 'memetics,' which flourished in the 1990s with contributions from philosopher Daniel Dennett and psychologist Susan Blackmore. Blackmore's 1999 book 'The Meme Machine' argued that memes are not merely an analogy to genes but genuine replicators in their own right, subject to the same evolutionary dynamics.
The internet gave the word its second meaning. In the mid-2000s, internet users began referring to viral images, videos, and jokes — LOLcats, Rickrolling, 'All Your Base Are Belong to Us' — as 'memes.' The usage was initially self-conscious and semi-ironic, but by the 2010s it had become the dominant meaning. For most people today, a 'meme' is a funny image with text overlaid on it, shared on social media.
Later History
The internet sense is both a narrowing and a vindication of Dawkins's original concept. It is a narrowing because Dawkins meant something far broader than funny pictures — he meant any culturally transmitted unit of information. But it is a vindication because internet memes behave exactly as Dawkins predicted cultural replicators would: they copy themselves from person to person, they mutate as each person adds their own variation, and they are subject to selection pressure (the funniest and most resonant versions survive while others fade). A meme template like 'Distracted Boyfriend' or 'Drake Approving' is a replicator in precisely Dawkins's sense — it maintains a recognizable structure while the content varies.
Dawkins himself has commented on the internet meaning with a mixture of bemusement and satisfaction. In a 2013 interview, he noted that internet memes are 'not quite what I originally meant,' but acknowledged that they 'demonstrate the concept beautifully' because they mutate and compete in a way that closely parallels biological evolution.
The word's journey from a Greek root meaning 'imitation' through a 1976 academic coinage to a universal internet term is itself a case study in cultural evolution. 'Meme' replicated from Dawkins's book into academic discourse, from academia into internet subculture, and from subculture into global mainstream language — mutating at each stage, selected for at each stage, surviving because it filled a niche no other word could.