"memory hole" meaning in All languages combined

See memory hole on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

IPA: /ˈmɛm(ə)ɹi ˌhəʊl/ [Received-Pronunciation], /ˈmɛm(ə)ɹi ˌhoʊl/ [General-American] Audio: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-memory hole.wav [Southern-England] Forms: memory holes [plural]
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 documents for destruction are dropped. Etymology templates: {{compound|en|memory|hole|notext=1|type=exocentric}} memory + hole, {{langname|en}} English, {{senseno|en|place|uc=1}} Sense 1, {{coinage|en|George Orwell|nat=the English|nocap=1|notext=1|occ=writer}} the English writer George Orwell Head templates: {{en-noun}} memory hole (plural memory holes)
  1. A figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up; nowhere, oblivion. Categories (topical): Fictional locations Synonyms: bit bucket, /dev/null Translations (figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up): ثقب الذاكرة (Arabic), 思舊穴 (Chinese Mandarin), 思旧穴 (sījiùxué, sījiùxuè) (Chinese Mandarin), 忘怀洞 (wànghuáidòng) (Chinese Mandarin), musta aukko (Finnish), muistiaukko (Finnish), Erinnerungsloch [neuter] (German), Gedächtnisloch [neuter] (German), buco della memoria [masculine] (Italian), buraco da memória [masculine] (Portuguese), hafıza deliği (Turkish)
    Sense id: en-memory_hole-en-noun-en:place Disambiguation of Fictional locations: 27 33 40 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English exocentric compounds, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 24 38 38 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 23 38 39 Disambiguation of English exocentric compounds: 27 33 39 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 25 36 39 Disambiguation of 'figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up': 84 8 8
  2. (computing)
    A fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory.
    Categories (topical): Computing, Fictional locations Translations (fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory): tyhjä osoitealue (Finnish)
    Sense id: en-memory_hole-en-noun-T4Ey7D9M Disambiguation of Fictional locations: 27 33 40 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English exocentric compounds, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 24 38 38 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 23 38 39 Disambiguation of English exocentric compounds: 27 33 39 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 25 36 39 Topics: computing, engineering, mathematics, natural-sciences, physical-sciences, sciences Disambiguation of 'fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory': 6 79 15
  3. (computing)
    (rare) 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”)
    Tags: rare Categories (topical): Computing, Fictional locations Synonyms: memory leak [synonym, synonym-of]
    Sense id: en-memory_hole-en-noun-HWX~O~Fj Disambiguation of Fictional locations: 27 33 40 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English exocentric compounds, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 24 38 38 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 23 38 39 Disambiguation of English exocentric compounds: 27 33 39 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 25 36 39 Topics: computing, engineering, mathematics, natural-sciences, physical-sciences, sciences
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Synonyms: memory-hole Derived forms: memory-hole [verb]

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for memory hole meaning in All languages combined (16.1kB)

{
  "derived": [
    {
      "_dis1": "0 50 50",
      "tags": [
        "verb"
      ],
      "word": "memory-hole"
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      "args": {
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        "2": "memory",
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        "type": "exocentric"
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      "name": "compound"
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      "args": {
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        "2": "place",
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    {
      "args": {
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        "2": "George Orwell",
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        "occ": "writer"
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      "expansion": "the English writer George Orwell",
      "name": "coinage"
    }
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  "etymology_text": "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 documents for destruction are dropped.",
  "forms": [
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      "form": "memory holes",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
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  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
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      "name": "en-noun"
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  "hyphenation": [
    "mem‧o‧ry"
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
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    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "_dis": "24 38 38",
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
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          "_dis": "27 33 40",
          "kind": "topical",
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          "name": "Fictional locations",
          "orig": "en:Fictional locations",
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        {
          "ref": "1957, Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, with the assistance of Julius Jacobson, “The Cold War: Repression and Collapse”, in The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919–1957), Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, →OCLC, page 453",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1969 July 2, John R[ichard] Rarick, “Challenge to America, 1969”, in Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 91st Congress, First Session (United States House of Representatives), volume 115, part 14, Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 18349, column 1",
          "text": "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 out money could be shoved into the \"memory hole.\"",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1970 January–February, Hugh McLean, “Et Resurrexerunt: How Writers Rise from the Dead”, in Abraham Brumberg, editor, Problems of Communism, volume XIX, number 1, Washington, D.C.: United States Information Agency, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 17, column 2",
          "text": "[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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1986 October 1, John L. H. Keep, Soldiering in Tsarist Russia (The Harmon Memorial Lectures in Military History; 29), El Paso County, Colo.: United States Air Force Academy, →OCLC, page 1",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2001 May 24, Jasper Becker, “‘Comrade Jiang Zemin Does Indeed Seem a Proper Choice’ [review of The Tiananmen Papers (2001) by Zhang Liang]”, in Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor, London Review of Books, volume 23, number 10, London: LRB Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2022-12-06",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2011, Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway, “Denial Rides Again: The Revisionist Attack on Rachel Carson”, in Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, New York, N.Y.: Bloomsbury Press, page 236",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
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      ],
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        "A figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up; nowhere, oblivion."
      ],
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      "links": [
        [
          "figurative",
          "figurative"
        ],
        [
          "place",
          "place#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "information",
          "information"
        ],
        [
          "deliberately",
          "deliberately"
        ],
        [
          "sent",
          "send#Verb"
        ],
        [
          "forgotten",
          "forget"
        ],
        [
          "lost",
          "lost#Adjective"
        ],
        [
          "ends up",
          "end up"
        ],
        [
          "nowhere",
          "nowhere#Noun"
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          "oblivion",
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      "senseid": [
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      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "bit bucket"
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          "word": "/dev/null"
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        {
          "_dis1": "84 8 8",
          "code": "ar",
          "lang": "Arabic",
          "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
          "word": "ثقب الذاكرة"
        },
        {
          "_dis1": "84 8 8",
          "code": "cmn",
          "lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
          "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
          "word": "思舊穴"
        },
        {
          "_dis1": "84 8 8",
          "code": "cmn",
          "lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
          "roman": "sījiùxué, sījiùxuè",
          "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
          "word": "思旧穴"
        },
        {
          "_dis1": "84 8 8",
          "code": "cmn",
          "lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
          "roman": "wànghuáidòng",
          "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
          "word": "忘怀洞"
        },
        {
          "_dis1": "84 8 8",
          "code": "fi",
          "lang": "Finnish",
          "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
          "word": "musta aukko"
        },
        {
          "_dis1": "84 8 8",
          "code": "fi",
          "lang": "Finnish",
          "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
          "word": "muistiaukko"
        },
        {
          "_dis1": "84 8 8",
          "code": "de",
          "lang": "German",
          "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
          "tags": [
            "neuter"
          ],
          "word": "Erinnerungsloch"
        },
        {
          "_dis1": "84 8 8",
          "code": "de",
          "lang": "German",
          "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
          "tags": [
            "neuter"
          ],
          "word": "Gedächtnisloch"
        },
        {
          "_dis1": "84 8 8",
          "code": "it",
          "lang": "Italian",
          "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
          "tags": [
            "masculine"
          ],
          "word": "buco della memoria"
        },
        {
          "_dis1": "84 8 8",
          "code": "pt",
          "lang": "Portuguese",
          "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
          "tags": [
            "masculine"
          ],
          "word": "buraco da memória"
        },
        {
          "_dis1": "84 8 8",
          "code": "tr",
          "lang": "Turkish",
          "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
          "word": "hafıza deliği"
        }
      ]
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          "_dis": "25 36 39",
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          "_dis": "27 33 40",
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      ],
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        {
          "ref": "1997, Stephen J. Bigelow, “System Questions”, in PC Hardware FAT FAQs: Troubleshooting, Upgrading, Maintaining, and Repairing, New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, pages 11–12",
          "text": "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, you should enable the memory hole.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2001 June, Alessandro Rubini, Jonathan Corbet, “Hardware Management”, in Andy Oram, editor, Linux Device Drivers, 2nd edition, Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly & Associates, page 245",
          "text": "We won't touch high ISA memory (the so-called memory hole in the 14 MB to 16 MB physical address range), because that kind of I/O memory is extremely rare nowadays and is not supported by the majority of modern motherboards or by the kernel.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory."
      ],
      "id": "en-memory_hole-en-noun-T4Ey7D9M",
      "links": [
        [
          "computing",
          "computing#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "fragment",
          "fragment#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "physical",
          "physical#Adjective"
        ],
        [
          "address space",
          "address space"
        ],
        [
          "map",
          "map#Verb"
        ],
        [
          "main memory",
          "main memory"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(computing)",
        "A fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory."
      ],
      "topics": [
        "computing",
        "engineering",
        "mathematics",
        "natural-sciences",
        "physical-sciences",
        "sciences"
      ],
      "translations": [
        {
          "_dis1": "6 79 15",
          "code": "fi",
          "lang": "Finnish",
          "sense": "fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory",
          "word": "tyhjä osoitealue"
        }
      ]
    },
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        },
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          "kind": "topical",
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          "name": "Fictional locations",
          "orig": "en:Fictional locations",
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            "Fiction",
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        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1992 September 9, Andrew McRae, “C++ in an Embedded Environment”, in AUUG 1992 Conference & Exhibition: Maintaining Control in an Open World: World Congress Centre, Melbourne, Australia, 8–11 September 1992: Conference Proceedings, Kensington, N.S.W.: AUUG, paragraph 5.5, page 5",
          "text": "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 free it (causing a memory hole). This typically occurs when a subroutine allocates some memory via malloc, and during some processing a premature return taken that does not free the allocated memory.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2008, Andre Bogus, “Writing Lighttpd Modules”, in Lighttpd: Installing, Compiling, Configuring, Optimizing, and Securing this Lighting-fast Web Server, Birmingham, West Midlands: Packt Publishing",
          "text": "When Lighttpd finishes, it calls mod_helloworld_free to release the memory held by plugin_data. Beware that not freeing the plugin_data creates a memory hole.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "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”)"
      ],
      "id": "en-memory_hole-en-noun-HWX~O~Fj",
      "links": [
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          "computing",
          "computing#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "memory leak",
          "memory leak#English"
        ],
        [
          "several",
          "several#Adjective"
        ],
        [
          "faults",
          "fault#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "memory",
          "memory"
        ],
        [
          "allocation",
          "allocation"
        ],
        [
          "logic",
          "logic"
        ],
        [
          "computer",
          "computer"
        ],
        [
          "program",
          "program#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "parts",
          "part#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "become",
          "become"
        ],
        [
          "hidden",
          "hidden#Adjective"
        ],
        [
          "unusable",
          "unusable"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(computing)",
        "(rare) 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”)"
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "extra": "any of several faults in the memory allocation logic of a computer or program whereby parts of memory become hidden or unusable",
          "tags": [
            "synonym",
            "synonym-of"
          ],
          "word": "memory leak"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "rare"
      ],
      "topics": [
        "computing",
        "engineering",
        "mathematics",
        "natural-sciences",
        "physical-sciences",
        "sciences"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "ipa": "/ˈmɛm(ə)ɹi ˌhəʊl/",
      "tags": [
        "Received-Pronunciation"
      ]
    },
    {
      "ipa": "/ˈmɛm(ə)ɹi ˌhoʊl/",
      "tags": [
        "General-American"
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      "tags": [
        "Southern-England"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (Southern England)"
    }
  ],
  "synonyms": [
    {
      "_dis1": "0 50 50",
      "word": "memory-hole"
    }
  ],
  "wikipedia": [
    "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
  ],
  "word": "memory hole"
}
{
  "categories": [
    "English coinages",
    "English compound terms",
    "English countable nouns",
    "English entries with incorrect language header",
    "English entries with topic categories using raw markup",
    "English exocentric compounds",
    "English lemmas",
    "English multiword terms",
    "English noun-noun compound nouns",
    "English nouns",
    "English terms coined by George Orwell",
    "English terms derived from Nineteen Eighty-Four",
    "English terms with IPA pronunciation",
    "English terms with audio links",
    "English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys",
    "Requests for gender in Arabic entries",
    "en:Fictional locations"
  ],
  "derived": [
    {
      "tags": [
        "verb"
      ],
      "word": "memory-hole"
    }
  ],
  "etymology_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "memory",
        "3": "hole",
        "notext": "1",
        "type": "exocentric"
      },
      "expansion": "memory + hole",
      "name": "compound"
    },
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en"
      },
      "expansion": "English",
      "name": "langname"
    },
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "place",
        "uc": "1"
      },
      "expansion": "Sense 1",
      "name": "senseno"
    },
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "George Orwell",
        "nat": "the English",
        "nocap": "1",
        "notext": "1",
        "occ": "writer"
      },
      "expansion": "the English writer George Orwell",
      "name": "coinage"
    }
  ],
  "etymology_text": "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 documents for destruction are dropped.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "memory holes",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "memory hole (plural memory holes)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "hyphenation": [
    "mem‧o‧ry"
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English terms with quotations"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1957, Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, with the assistance of Julius Jacobson, “The Cold War: Repression and Collapse”, in The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919–1957), Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, →OCLC, page 453",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1969 July 2, John R[ichard] Rarick, “Challenge to America, 1969”, in Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 91st Congress, First Session (United States House of Representatives), volume 115, part 14, Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 18349, column 1",
          "text": "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 out money could be shoved into the \"memory hole.\"",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1970 January–February, Hugh McLean, “Et Resurrexerunt: How Writers Rise from the Dead”, in Abraham Brumberg, editor, Problems of Communism, volume XIX, number 1, Washington, D.C.: United States Information Agency, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 17, column 2",
          "text": "[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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1986 October 1, John L. H. Keep, Soldiering in Tsarist Russia (The Harmon Memorial Lectures in Military History; 29), El Paso County, Colo.: United States Air Force Academy, →OCLC, page 1",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2001 May 24, Jasper Becker, “‘Comrade Jiang Zemin Does Indeed Seem a Proper Choice’ [review of The Tiananmen Papers (2001) by Zhang Liang]”, in Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor, London Review of Books, volume 23, number 10, London: LRB Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2022-12-06",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2011, Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway, “Denial Rides Again: The Revisionist Attack on Rachel Carson”, in Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, New York, N.Y.: Bloomsbury Press, page 236",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up; nowhere, oblivion."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "figurative",
          "figurative"
        ],
        [
          "place",
          "place#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "information",
          "information"
        ],
        [
          "deliberately",
          "deliberately"
        ],
        [
          "sent",
          "send#Verb"
        ],
        [
          "forgotten",
          "forget"
        ],
        [
          "lost",
          "lost#Adjective"
        ],
        [
          "ends up",
          "end up"
        ],
        [
          "nowhere",
          "nowhere#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "oblivion",
          "oblivion"
        ]
      ],
      "senseid": [
        "en:place"
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "bit bucket"
        },
        {
          "word": "/dev/null"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "categories": [
        "English terms with quotations",
        "en:Computing"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1997, Stephen J. Bigelow, “System Questions”, in PC Hardware FAT FAQs: Troubleshooting, Upgrading, Maintaining, and Repairing, New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, pages 11–12",
          "text": "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, you should enable the memory hole.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2001 June, Alessandro Rubini, Jonathan Corbet, “Hardware Management”, in Andy Oram, editor, Linux Device Drivers, 2nd edition, Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly & Associates, page 245",
          "text": "We won't touch high ISA memory (the so-called memory hole in the 14 MB to 16 MB physical address range), because that kind of I/O memory is extremely rare nowadays and is not supported by the majority of modern motherboards or by the kernel.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "computing",
          "computing#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "fragment",
          "fragment#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "physical",
          "physical#Adjective"
        ],
        [
          "address space",
          "address space"
        ],
        [
          "map",
          "map#Verb"
        ],
        [
          "main memory",
          "main memory"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(computing)",
        "A fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory."
      ],
      "topics": [
        "computing",
        "engineering",
        "mathematics",
        "natural-sciences",
        "physical-sciences",
        "sciences"
      ]
    },
    {
      "categories": [
        "English terms with quotations",
        "English terms with rare senses",
        "en:Computing"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1992 September 9, Andrew McRae, “C++ in an Embedded Environment”, in AUUG 1992 Conference & Exhibition: Maintaining Control in an Open World: World Congress Centre, Melbourne, Australia, 8–11 September 1992: Conference Proceedings, Kensington, N.S.W.: AUUG, paragraph 5.5, page 5",
          "text": "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 free it (causing a memory hole). This typically occurs when a subroutine allocates some memory via malloc, and during some processing a premature return taken that does not free the allocated memory.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2008, Andre Bogus, “Writing Lighttpd Modules”, in Lighttpd: Installing, Compiling, Configuring, Optimizing, and Securing this Lighting-fast Web Server, Birmingham, West Midlands: Packt Publishing",
          "text": "When Lighttpd finishes, it calls mod_helloworld_free to release the memory held by plugin_data. Beware that not freeing the plugin_data creates a memory hole.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "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”)"
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "computing",
          "computing#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "memory leak",
          "memory leak#English"
        ],
        [
          "several",
          "several#Adjective"
        ],
        [
          "faults",
          "fault#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "memory",
          "memory"
        ],
        [
          "allocation",
          "allocation"
        ],
        [
          "logic",
          "logic"
        ],
        [
          "computer",
          "computer"
        ],
        [
          "program",
          "program#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "parts",
          "part#Noun"
        ],
        [
          "become",
          "become"
        ],
        [
          "hidden",
          "hidden#Adjective"
        ],
        [
          "unusable",
          "unusable"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(computing)",
        "(rare) 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”)"
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "extra": "any of several faults in the memory allocation logic of a computer or program whereby parts of memory become hidden or unusable",
          "tags": [
            "synonym",
            "synonym-of"
          ],
          "word": "memory leak"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "rare"
      ],
      "topics": [
        "computing",
        "engineering",
        "mathematics",
        "natural-sciences",
        "physical-sciences",
        "sciences"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "ipa": "/ˈmɛm(ə)ɹi ˌhəʊl/",
      "tags": [
        "Received-Pronunciation"
      ]
    },
    {
      "ipa": "/ˈmɛm(ə)ɹi ˌhoʊl/",
      "tags": [
        "General-American"
      ]
    },
    {
      "audio": "LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-memory hole.wav",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/9/9c/LL-Q1860_%28eng%29-Vealhurl-memory_hole.wav/LL-Q1860_%28eng%29-Vealhurl-memory_hole.wav.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/9/9c/LL-Q1860_%28eng%29-Vealhurl-memory_hole.wav/LL-Q1860_%28eng%29-Vealhurl-memory_hole.wav.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Southern-England"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (Southern England)"
    }
  ],
  "synonyms": [
    {
      "word": "memory-hole"
    }
  ],
  "translations": [
    {
      "code": "ar",
      "lang": "Arabic",
      "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
      "word": "ثقب الذاكرة"
    },
    {
      "code": "cmn",
      "lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
      "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
      "word": "思舊穴"
    },
    {
      "code": "cmn",
      "lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
      "roman": "sījiùxué, sījiùxuè",
      "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
      "word": "思旧穴"
    },
    {
      "code": "cmn",
      "lang": "Chinese Mandarin",
      "roman": "wànghuáidòng",
      "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
      "word": "忘怀洞"
    },
    {
      "code": "fi",
      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
      "word": "musta aukko"
    },
    {
      "code": "fi",
      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
      "word": "muistiaukko"
    },
    {
      "code": "de",
      "lang": "German",
      "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
      "tags": [
        "neuter"
      ],
      "word": "Erinnerungsloch"
    },
    {
      "code": "de",
      "lang": "German",
      "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
      "tags": [
        "neuter"
      ],
      "word": "Gedächtnisloch"
    },
    {
      "code": "it",
      "lang": "Italian",
      "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
      "tags": [
        "masculine"
      ],
      "word": "buco della memoria"
    },
    {
      "code": "pt",
      "lang": "Portuguese",
      "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
      "tags": [
        "masculine"
      ],
      "word": "buraco da memória"
    },
    {
      "code": "tr",
      "lang": "Turkish",
      "sense": "figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up",
      "word": "hafıza deliği"
    },
    {
      "code": "fi",
      "lang": "Finnish",
      "sense": "fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory",
      "word": "tyhjä osoitealue"
    }
  ],
  "wikipedia": [
    "Nineteen Eighty-Four"
  ],
  "word": "memory hole"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-26 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (93a6c53 and 21a9316). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.