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mem·o·ry (mĕmə-rē)
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n. pl. mem·o·ries
1. The mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experience.
2. The act or an instance of remembering; recollection: spent the afternoon lost in memory.
3. All that a person can remember: It hasn't happened in my memory.
4. Something that is remembered: pleasant childhood memories.
5. The fact of being remembered; remembrance: dedicated to their parents' memory.
6. The period of time covered by the remembrance or recollection of a person or group of persons: within the memory of humankind.
7. Computers
a. A circuit or device that stores digital data.
b. Capacity for storing information: two gigabytes of memory.
8. Statistics The set of past events affecting a given event in a stochastic process.
9. The capacity of a material, such as plastic or metal, to return to a previous shape after deformation.
10. Immunology The ability of the immune system to respond faster and more powerfully to subsequent exposure to an antigen.

[Middle English memorie, from Anglo-French, from Latin memoria, from memor, mindful; see (s)mer-1 in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.]

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ©2022 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
 

Indo-European & Semitic Roots Appendices

    Thousands of entries in the dictionary include etymologies that trace their origins back to reconstructed proto-languages. You can obtain more information about these forms in our online appendices:

    Indo-European Roots

    Semitic Roots

    The Indo-European appendix covers nearly half of the Indo-European roots that have left their mark on English words. A more complete treatment of Indo-European roots and the English words derived from them is available in our Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.