Memeing

1996internet slangclassic

Published September 24, 2026

Memeing is the verb form of meme, covering everything from making a single image macro to holding a full conversation in meme format. Writer Matthew Aaron Taylor coined the word in 1996 for a Telepolis essay on fiction and artificial life, decades before the internet's meme habit made the term familiar and shows like South Park and Gravity Falls started dropping it into scripts.

internet linguistics memesslang memesinternet meta memesmemetics memesurban dictionary memes

Overview

The verb covers a handful of overlapping uses. At its plainest, memeing means producing or forwarding a meme, but by 2013 the definition widened to include holding an entire conversation in meme format4. Urban Dictionary contributors added flavors like physically imitating a meme in real life or messing around in an intentionally absurd but deliberate way3.

The word also bends into related forms. The past tense 'memed' shows up in the parody expression 'get memed on', a riff on the earlier 'get dunked on' insult4. The verb rarely sits in formal writing but shows up nonstop in gaming voice chat, Discord servers, and reply chains where people trade image macros back and forth.

Origin & Background

Platform
Telepolis (1996 essay) / Urban Dictionary and TV (viral spread)
Creator
Matthew Aaron Taylor
Date
1996

The paper trail for memeing runs back to May 3rd, 1996, when Matthew Aaron Taylor published an essay titled 'Fiction, AL, and the Memeing of Life' on the German tech site Telepolis1. The piece framed fiction as a form of artificial life and named Richard Dawkins and Douglas Hofstadter as intellectual reference points, decades before image macros went mainstream1.

The noun 'meme' itself was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, shortened from the Greek 'mimeme' meaning 'imitated thing'2. Taylor's essay is an unusually early attested use of the verb form built on that root.

How It Spread

Memeing hit mainstream television on March 28th, 2012, when South Park aired the episode 'Faith Hilling'. The plot centers on photo fads like Tebowing and includes an in-universe educational short called 'Bloody Sunday: The Dangers of Memeing', in which characters get struck by trains while striking meme poses5.

Three years later, on August 24th, 2015, Gravity Falls picked up the word in 'The Stanchurian Candidate'. Wendy tells Stanford Pines 'You're memeing fast, and none of them are good' while showing him a 'One Does Not Simply Walk into Mordor' edit of his own face6. Around the same window Urban Dictionary users kept logging entries for the verb, treating it as regular slang for creating or trading memes in real time3.

How to Use This Meme

Memeing typically works as an intransitive verb, as in 'I was memeing', 'we memed all night', or 'stop memeing in the group chat'. Common uses include describing intentional absurdity in gaming lobbies, replying to friends only in image macros, or striking a recognizable meme pose in real life3.

Frequently Asked Questions