Memex
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A proposed computer system, implemented with electromechanical controls and microfilm equipment, that would permit a researcher to follow and annotate topics of interest, analogous to later hypertext technologies.
"Surely when Vannevar Bush imagined his hyperlinked memex or Jorge Luis Borges his Library of Babel or Tim Berners-Lee his World Wide Web, what excited them wasn’t the possibility of reading the boldfaced words “nympho starlets” in a printed novel, racing to the nearest computer to type a U.R.L. into a browser and watching a YouTube clip of James Blunt singing “You’re Beautiful” over scenes of Sharon Tate in “The Fearless Vampire Killers.”"
Example
More examples"Surely when Vannevar Bush imagined his hyperlinked memex or Jorge Luis Borges his Library of Babel or Tim Berners-Lee his World Wide Web, what excited them wasn’t the possibility of reading the boldfaced words “nympho starlets” in a printed novel, racing to the nearest computer to type a U.R.L. into a browser and watching a YouTube clip of James Blunt singing “You’re Beautiful” over scenes of Sharon Tate in “The Fearless Vampire Killers.”"
Etymology
Blend of memory + index, coined by Vannevar Bush in his article As We May Think (1945) in The Atlantic Monthly.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.