memory hole
English · Thesaurus
AI In plain words
Writing a short explanation…
Written by a house AI from the entry below, in your language. The entry itself is the source.
memory hole
- /ˈmɛm(ə)ɹi ˌhəʊl/ UK
- /ˈmɛm(ə)ɹi ˌhoʊl/ US
Where it comes from
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.
noun memory holes · memory-hole
-
A figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up; nowhere, oblivion.
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.
Similar: bit bucket, /dev/null
- A fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory. A memory hole provides performance improvement by reserving certain parts of memory for use by ISA cards. […] The memory hole is usually disabled because there are few ISA cards today that need to be mapped. If you have an ISA card that refuses to function properly in a PC with more than 16MB of RAM
-
Synonym of memory leak (“any of several faults in the memory allocation logic of a computer or program whereby parts of memory become hidden or unusable”).
The use of new and delete, along with the scope related creation and deletion of objects, provide safer and more consistent management of the available memory pool. […] It also resolves common problems with passing incorrect pointers to free, or obtaining memory using malloc and then forgetting to f
Similar: memory leak
Translations
Every language
noun figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up
| 中文 | 思舊穴 /思旧穴 sījiùxué, sījiùxuè, 忘懷洞 /忘怀洞 wànghuáidòng |
|---|---|
| Português | buraco da memória |
| Deutsch | Erinnerungsloch, Gedächtnisloch |
| Italiano | buco della memoria |
| العربية | ثقب الذاكرة |
Talk about this word "memory hole." Wiktionary, via Micwyn, micwyn.com/word/memory%20hole. Accessed 6 Nov. 2026. memory hole. (n.d.). In Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Retrieved November 6, 2026, from https://micwyn.com/word/memory%20hole "memory hole." Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Accessed November 6, 2026. https://micwyn.com/word/memory%20hole.Cite this
@misc{memory_hole_2026,
title = {memory hole},
howpublished = {Wiktionary, via Micwyn},
year = {2026},
url = {https://micwyn.com/word/memory%20hole},
urldate = {2026-11-06}
}
