The compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary operate a sensible criterion for deciding whether a new word shall be canonised by inclusion. The aspirant word must be commonly used without needing to be defined and without its coinage being attributed whenever it is used. To ask the metamemetic question, how widespread is ‘meme’? A far from ideal, but nevertheless easy and convenient method of sampling the meme pool, is provided by the World Wide Web and the ease with which it may be searched. I did a quick search of the Web on the day of writing this, which happened to be 29 August 1998. ‘Meme’ is mentioned about half a million times, but that is a ridiculously high figure, obviously confounded by various acronyms and the French meme. The adjectival form ‘memetic’, however, is genuinely exclusive, and it clocked up 5042 mentions. To put this number into perspective, I compared a few other recently coined words or fashionable expressions. Spin doctor (or spin-doctor) gets 1412 mentions, dumbing down 3905, docudrama (or docu-drama) 2848, sociobiology 6679, catastrophe theory 1472, edge of chaos 2673, wannabee 2650, zippergate 1752, studmuffin 776, post-structural (or poststructural) 577, extended phenotype 515, exaptation 307. Of the 5042 mentions of memetic, more than 90 per cent make no mention of the origin of the word, which suggests that it does indeed meet the 0£D’s criterion. And, as Susan Blackmore tells us, the Oxford English Dictionary now does contain the following definition: meme – An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation.
Dawkins, Richard. Foreword to The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
via