Word.ws English Dictionary

kleptomnesia

kleptomnesia noun: the situation where a person comes up with an idea that they believe to be original, but which was in fact created by someone else and previously encountered by the person.

Noun

kleptomnesia (uncountable)

  1. (neologism) The situation where a person comes up with an idea that they believe to be original, but which was in fact created by someone else and previously encountered by the person.
    • Kleptomnesia happens due to a pragmatic, but peculiar, feature of how human memory is wired. When we encode information, we tend to pay more attention to the content than the source. Once we accept a piece of information as true, we no longer need to worry about where we acquired it.2015 January 2, Adam Grant, “The Biggest Reason We Steal Other People’s Ideas”, in Time, archived from the original on 20 Mar 2016
    • Chad Bauman has offered a great model for the “make your own religion” exercise, and I will engage in repeated acts of “kleptomnesia” in appropriating his ideas.2016 January 5, CM Bauman, BAR Hege, R Kleckley…, “The “make your own religion” project”, in Teaching Theology & Religion, volume 19, number 1, pages 99–110

Examples of kleptomnesia in a sentence

  • It’s fair to say that psychologists haven’t exactly figured out a way around kleptomnesia, and maybe Melania Trump’s speech might instigate research into this fuzzy area.2016 July 19, Tanya Basu, “Melania Trump's Speechwriters Apparently Suffer From Kleptomnesia”, in Inverse, archived from the original on 01...
  • We're all vulnerable to “kleptomnesia”—accidentally remembering the ideas of others as our own.2017, Adam Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, New York: Penguin Books, →ISBN, page 3:
  • Like every other author, I'm vulnerable to 'kleptomnesia' – accidentally remembering the ideas of others as your own.2019, Andy Cope, The Little Book of Being Brilliant, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 169:
  • Everyone is vulnerable to "kleptomnesia," or accidentally remembering the ideas of others as our own.2021, Lisa Grossman Liu, The Transparent, Concurrent, and Collaborative Health Record (thesis), New York: Columbia University, →DOI, page...

Origin of kleptomnesia

Coined by Dan Gilbert in or before 1999.

Questions about kleptomnesia

What does kleptomnesia mean?
Kleptomnesia means the situation where a person comes up with an idea that they believe to be original, but which was in fact created by someone else and previously encountered by the person.
How do you use kleptomnesia in a sentence?
It’s fair to say that psychologists haven’t exactly figured out a way around kleptomnesia, and maybe Melania Trump’s speech might instigate research into this fuzzy area.
What part of speech is kleptomnesia?
Kleptomnesia is a noun.

Words near kleptomnesia in the dictionary

  1. kleptomaniac
  2. kleptomaniacal
  3. kleptomaniacally
  4. kleptomaniacs
  5. kleptomanias
  6. kleptomnesia
  7. klepton
  8. kleptons
  9. kleptoparasite
  10. kleptoparasited
  11. kleptoparasites

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: kleptomnesia (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.

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