memory Hear it!

memory Definition

memo·ry (memə rē, mem)

noun pl. -·ries

  1. the power, act, or process of recalling to mind facts previously learned or past experiences
  2. the total of what one remembers
  3. a person, thing, happening, or act remembered
  4. the length of time over which remembering extends a happening within the memory of living men
  5. commemoration or remembrance in memory of his father
  6. the fact of being remembered; posthumous reputation
  7. plastic memory
  8. Electronics
    1. a device in a computer, guidance system, etc., designed to accept, store, and recall information or instructions; specif., random-access memory
    2. storage or storage capacity as of a computer, disk, etc.

Etymology: ME memorie < OFr < L memoria < memor, mindful, remembering < IE *mimoro-, redupl. of base *(s)mer-, to remember, recall > merit

memory Synonyms

memory

n.

  1. The power to call up the past

    recollection, recall, retention, retrospection, reminiscence, thought, mindfulness, consciousness, subconsciousness, unconscious memory, retentive memory, déjà vu (French), ready memory, photographic memory, visual memory, auditory memory; see also mind 1, remembrance 1.

  2. That which can be recalled

    remembrance, recollection, mental image, picture, vision, sound image, representation, fantasy, concept; see also thought 2.

memory Telecom Definition
A device that stores computer data or programs for subsequent retrieval. In the general sense, the term refers to all forms of on-line storage, including hard disk drives and tape drives. In practice, the term generally refers to a computer's fast semiconductor-based main memory, or random access memory (RAM), as distinguished from its secondary storage, such as hard drives.Virtual memory is disk space pretending to be RAM. See also flash memory, RAM, and ROM.
memory Usage Examples

Converse of subject

  • haunt: People living with deep, cruel scars minds haunted by memories too fearful to share.

Converse of object

  • treasure: Treasured memories of a special friend are ours to keep for ever.
  • evoke: This would have evoked primitive memories, the identification with the import of John's description would have been visceral.
  • allocate: The irony is that the only material builders use is memory - the allocated computer memory of the MUD.
  • bring: This brings back memories of the South African rugby training camps leading up to the 2003 World Cup.

Adjective modifier

  • fond: I have fond memories of the cast iron range in the front room there.
  • loving: The hurt we feel at your leaving will never pass, nor will the happy, loving memories that you've given us.
  • short-term: FORGETTING WHAT YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING That very slight loss of short-term memory can have some annoying effects.
  • distant: No Community Two words, a fragile leftover of some distant memory I was sure.
  • vivid: I have vivid memories of the torture inflicted on me by this experience.
  • collective: Also I feel wiki pages serve the collective memory of a group better than email threads in archives.

Modifies a noun

  • stick: It will work on your hard drive, or on memory sticks, aka thumb drives.
  • card: Decrease the data being written to the memory card to less than 32 MB.
  • lane: A trip down memory lane The last Rolls-Royce to be built at Crewe has left the production line.
  • allocation: The main difference between the two machines is the processing speed and memory allocation.
  • foam: What's required is quality sleep... Its true that people using Tempur memory foam turn less in their sleep.
  • slot: The only feature it's lacking is a memory expansion slot.

Noun used with modifier

  • childhood: Yeoman ) were close friends, he has been a link with our younger days with happy childhood memories.
  • flash: The latest flash memory drives allow for more than you can possibly imagine.
  • wartime: Have you got a wartime memory we might print?
memory Quotes

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

—Berger,John Peter

L'amoureux qui n'oublie pas quelquefois meurt par exce'  s, fatigue et tension de me¤  moire (tel Werther). The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).

—Barthes, Roland

It is all very well to copy what you see; it is much better to draw what you see only in memory.

—Degas, (Hilaire Germain) Edgar

Held in a lunar synthesis, Whispering lunar incantations Dissolve the floors of memory And all its clear relations Its divisions and precisions.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

I bequeath my soul to God† For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next age.

—Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans

I amöyet what I am, none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes.

—Clare,John

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom.

—Constantinus

Of those four winters which I passed in Indo-China opium has left the happiest memory.

—Greene, (Henry) Graham

Par toi tout le bonheur que m'offre l'avenir Est dans mon souvenir. Through you, all the happiness that the future offers Is in my memory.

—Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline

I remember that the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been,Would he had blotted a thousand: which they thought a malevolent speech†[but] I loved themanand do honour hismemory, on thisside idolatry, as much as any.

—Jonson, Ben

If I be evil intreated, or sent away with a flea in mine ear, let him look that Iwill rail onhimsoundly; nor foranhour or a day, whiles the injury is fresh in my memory; but in some elaborate polished poem, which I will leave to the world when I am dead, to be a living image to all ages of his beggarly parsimony and ignoble illiberality.

—Nashe,Thomas

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

—Williams,TennesseeThomas Lanier

Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going.

—Williams,TennesseeThomas Lanier

I have but one request to make at my departure from this world, it isöthe charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives, dare now vindicate them, let no prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them rest in obscurity and peace! Let my memory be left in oblivion, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times and other men can do justicetomycharacter.Whenmycountry takesher place among thenations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.

—Emmet, Robert

[This] much curse I must send you, in the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet, and, when you die, your memorydie fromthe earth for want of an epigraph.

—Sidney, Sir Philip

She was cut off fromthe past and therefore did not live in the present. But suddenly, as she stood close against a pine tree and breathed in its sharp, bitter scent, a clear space opened to her childhood, as though a wind had sprung fromthesea, clearing a mist.It wasnot a memory from the past, it was the past itself, as alive, as real; and she knew that she and the child of forty years ago were the same person.

—Thomas, D(onald) M(itchell)

Come to me in the silence of the night; Come in the speaking silence of a dream; Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright As sunlight on a stream; Come back in tears, O memory, hope, love of finished years.

—Rossetti, Christina Georgina

Theyare all gone into the world of light, And I alone sit lingering here; Their very memory is fair and bright, And my sad thoughts doth clear.

—Vaughan, Henry

There is a wicked inclination in most people to suppose anoldmandecayed inhisintellects.Ifayoungor middle- aged man, when leaving a company, does not recollect where he laid his hat, it is nothing; but if the same inattention is discovered inanold man, people will shrug up their shoulders, and say,'His memory isgoing.'

—Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson

The way you wear your hat, The way you sip your tea, The mem'ry of all thatö No, no! They can't take that away from me!

—Gershwin, Ira originally Israel Gershowitz

Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mist of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.

—Thatcher, Margaret HildaThatcher, Baroness

For an actress to be a success she must have the face of Venus, the brains of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, thememoryof Macaulay, thefigure of Juno, and thehide of a rhinoceros.

—Barrymore, Ethel

For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog isbetter thana dead lion.For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.

—Bible (Old Testament)

All habits are geared towards the linear, the sequential, but memory refuses such orderliness.

—Lively, Penelope (Margaret)

   'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked.

—Dodgson

Time is the metre, memory the only plot.

—Walcott, Derek Alton

Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

If a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, hehad need have a present wit; and if he read little he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.

—Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans

You have no part with lads who fought And laughed and suffered at my side. Your fugues and symphonies have brought No memory of my friends who died.

—Sassoon, Siegfried Louvain

No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness.

—Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills

Ce n'est que par la me¤  moire que nous sommes un me"  me individu pour les autres et pour nous-me"  mes. Il ne me reste peut-e"  tre pas, a'   l'a"  ge quej'ai, une seule mole¤  cule du corps que j'apportai en naissant. It is only in memory that we are the same person for others and for ourselves. At the age I am now, there is probably not a single molecule of my body that I had when born.

—Diderot, Denis

Life is not easy. I paint the memory of happiness.

—Saifoutdinov, Anvar

   Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?

—Didion,Joan

Good music isthat whichpenetratesthe ear with facility and quits the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

—Beecham, SirThomas

Bankers'genes were Wall St. genes, especially in the big cities. If the banks were conservative just now [1955], it was because bankers still awoke in the middle of the night, trembling and sweaty with thoughts of the Crash. But intimeanewgenerationwouldtake over: ambitious, overcompetitive young men to whom1929 would be merelya date on a page; such menwould sever theroots of memory as if with an ax, not realizing that those tendrils were also the rudder cables.

—Thomas, Michael M

'Tisn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just It. Some women'll stay in a man's memory if they once walked down a street.

—Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard

Thanks for the Memory.

—Robin, Leo

This is the use of memory: For liberationönot less of love but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the future as well as the past.

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues, that syllable men's names On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses.

—Milton,John

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

—Thoreau, Henry David

Music when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memoryö Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken.

—Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Now conscience wakes despair That slumbered, wakes the bitter memory Of what he was, what is, and what must be Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.

—Milton,John

Las grandes bellezas de la creacio¤  n no pueden a un tiempo ser vistas y cantadas: es necesario que vuelvan al alma empalidecidas por la memoria infiel. The most beautiful things on earth cannot be seen and sung at the same time: they must return to the soul weakened by unfaithful memory.

—Isaacs,Jorge

Browse dictionary entries near memory

  1. memorize
  2. memorialize
  3. memorialist
  4. Memorial Day
  5. memorial
  6. memorandum
  7. memorable
  8. memorabilia
  9. memoirist
  10. memoir
  1. Memphis
  2. Memphremagog
  3. MEMS
  4. memsahib
  5. men
  6. Menéndez de Avilés
  7. men's room
  8. -men
  9. menace
  10. menacing