memory hole
/ˈmɛm(ə)ɹi ˌhoʊl/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.43 in modern English
20
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
3
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up; nowhere, oblivion.
noun
A fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory.
Example Sentences
- "As relations between the West and Russia grew worse, the party began to discard its patriotic draperies; everything that had been said during the war years was now quietly dropped into the memory hole."
- "President [Richard] Nixon didn't even blush when he claimed that the raise in the debt limit was "in the interest of responsible management." If it were already 1984, all of Nixon's old speeches about the government squandering our money could be shoved into the "memory hole.""
- "[T]he innermost circle of the Stalinist limbo was occupied by the Damned. The Damned were by no means exponents of an alien ideology. On the contrary, they were numbered among the true believers—they were Communists. But despite superhuman efforts to obey the all-wise party, they nevertheless fell by the wayside and were swept into the memory hole."
- "After a few more years [Leon] Trotsky's name disappeared down the "memory hole," and the Red Army became a fully professional force in which certain selected values and traditions of the old army were resurrected and even made the object of a veritable cult."
- "Jiang Zemin has almost managed to make the event disappear down an Orwellian memory hole. Even in Western countries, sub-editors have taken to calling it the ‘Tiananmen crackdown’, rather than ‘massacre’, making it seem as insignificant as the endless stories about routine ‘crackdowns’ on smuggling, prostitution, counterfeit goods, VAT forms or corruption, which provide the stuff of daily reporting here in China."
- "The painstaking work of scientists, the reasoned deliberations of the President's Science Advisory Committee, and the bipartisan American agreement to ban DDT have been flushed down the memory hole, along with the well-documented and easily found (but extremely inconvenient) fact that the most important reason that DDT failed to eliminate malaria was because insects evolved."
Etymology
From memory + hole. Sense 1 (“figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up”) is a transferred use of the physical slots which the English writer George Orwell (1903–1950) refers to in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), into which censored documents for destruction are dropped.
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈmɛm(ə)ɹi ˌhoʊl/
- British English: /ˈmɛm(ə)ɹi ˌhəʊl/