It's the word of the day for February 8th.
Today's word is meme, spelled M-E-M-E.
Meme is a noun.
It's used popularly to refer to an amusing picture or video that is spread widely online.
It can also refer to an idea, behavior, style,
or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.
Here's the word used in a sentence from the Miami Herald.
Shane Hinton, a meteorologist for CBS News Miami,
posted a Facebook meme earlier this week that showed a 70-degree spread between Miami's near-record 85 and Minneapolis's 15.
In his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene,
British scientist Richard Dawkins defended his newly coined word meme,
which he defined as a unit of cultural transmission.
Having first considered then rejected mimeme, he wrote, mimeme comes from a suitable Greek root,
but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like the word gene.
The suitable Greek root was meme, M-I-M.
meaning mime or mimic.
The English suffix E-M-E indicates a distinctive unit of language structure,
such as grapheme, lexeme, or phoneme.
Like any good meme, the word meme caught on and evolved,
eventually developing the meaning known to anyone who spends time online,