Word.ws English Dictionary

antimeme

antimeme noun: a meme deployed to nullify or protect against another meme.

Noun

antimeme (plural antimemes)

  1. A meme deployed to nullify or protect against another meme.
    • I know it's every citizen's civic duty to keep his antimeme vaccinations up to date. But some perverse streak inside me (possibly, now that I think about it, an anti-antimeme meme) made me keep postponing my appointment until it was just too late.1998, Christine Beckert, David Bischoff, Carroll Brown, et al., The Best of Pirate Writings: Tales of Fantasy, Mystery & Science Fiction, Padwolf Pub Incorporated, →ISBN
    • As an antimeme to both Christianity and these secular dominant ideologies, humanism in the West was, by the middle of the century able to gain dominance in what had become, effectively, a vacant niche.2003, David Hurst, On Westernism: An Ideology's Bid for World Dominion
  2. A unit of information that prevents itself from being spread, either due to its contents, (e.g, a password or encrypted document,) or a secondary mechanism that prevents its transmission. (e.g, by erasing itself from any mind that it enters.)
    • SCP-055 is a "self-keeping secret" or "anti-meme". Information about SCP-055's physical appearance as well as its nature, behavior, and origins is self-classifying.2008, Sam "qntm" Hughes, “SCP-055 - [unknown]”, in There Is No Antimemetics Division
    • An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.2018, Sam "qntm" Hughes, There Is No Antimemetics Division
  3. (Internet) An image macro which intentionally subverts one's expectations by not including a joke; a meme antijoke.
    • my favorite parts of these viral memes are the antimemes that appear after we all get sick of them lol2018 March 18, @rocknraymond, Twitter, archived from the original on 03 Nov 2023

Examples of antimeme in a sentence

  • Notable as well are periodic claims that memetics will make the world a better place, by creating an antimeme meme which will teach us to defend ourselves against the ravages of the selfish memes, ...2004, William F. Harms, Information and Meaning in Evolutionary Processes, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 65:
  • We have to start spreading antimemes.” “Fight fire with fire?” she said.2010, Michael Flynn, In the Country of the Blind, Macmillan, →ISBN:

Forms of antimeme

pluralantimemes
alternative formanti-meme

Origin of antimeme

From anti- + meme. In the sense of "an image macro which intentionally subverts one's expectations", first recorded in 2009 and now chiefly associated with the r/antimeme subreddit, created February 8, 2012.

Words formed from antimeme

Questions about antimeme

What does antimeme mean?
Antimeme means a meme deployed to nullify or protect against another meme.
How do you use antimeme in a sentence?
Notable as well are periodic claims that memetics will make the world a better place, by creating an antimeme meme which will teach us to defend ourselves against the ravages of the selfish memes, ...
What part of speech is antimeme?
Antimeme is a noun.
What is the plural of antimeme?
The plural of antimeme is antimemes.

Words near antimeme in the dictionary

  1. antimelancholics
  2. antimelanization
  3. antimelanogenesis
  4. antimelanogenic
  5. antimelanoma
  6. antimeme
  7. antimemes
  8. antimemetic
  9. antimemetically
  10. antimemetics
  11. antimen

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: antimeme (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-antimeme.wav.

Cite this entry: “antimeme.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/antimeme. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.