memory

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun The mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experience.
• noun The act or an instance of remembering; recollection.
• noun All that a person can remember.
• noun Something that is remembered.
• noun The fact of being remembered; remembrance.
• noun The period of time covered by the remembrance or recollection of a person or group of persons.
• noun A unit of a computer that preserves data for retrieval.
• noun Capacity for storing information.
• noun Statistics The set of past events affecting a given event in a stochastic process.
• noun The capacity of a material, such as plastic or metal, to return to a previous shape after deformation.
• noun Immunology The ability of the immune system to respond faster and more powerfully to subsequent exposure to an antigen.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun Memory as mediated by kinesthetic images in the narrower sense.
• noun The mental capacity of retaining unconscious traces of conscious impressions or states, and of recalling these traces to consciousness with the attendant perception that they (or their objects) have a certain relation to the past; in a narrower sense, the power of such retention alone, the power or act of recalling being termed recollection.
• noun The fact of retaining such mental impressions; remembrance; mental hold on the past; retrospect; recollection.
• noun Length of time included in the conscious experience or observation of an individual, a community, or any succession of persons; the period of time during which the acquisition of knowledge is possible.
• noun The state of being remembered; continued presence in the minds or thoughts of men; retained or perpetuated knowledge; posterior note or reputation: as, to celebrate the memory of a great event.
• noun That which is remembered; anything fixed in or recalled to the mind; a mental impression; a reminiscence: as, pleasant memories of travel.
• noun That which brings to mind; a memento or memorial; a remembrancer.
• noun Commemoration; perpetuation of the knowledge of anything; a recalling to mind: as, a monument erected in memory of a person.
• noun An act or ceremony of remembrance; a service for the dead: same as commemoration, 2 .
• noun = Syn. 1-4. Memory, Recollection, Remembrance, Reminiscence. Memory is the general word for the faculty or capacity itself; recollection and remembrance are different kinds of exercise of the faculty; reminiscence, also, is used for the exercise of the faculty, but less commonly, and then it stands for the least energetic use of it, the matter seeming rather to be suggested to the mind. The correctness of the use of memory for that which is remembered has been disputed. The others are freely used for that which is remembered. In either sense, recollection implies more effort, more detail, and more union of objects in wholes, than remembrance. Reminiscence is used chiefly of past events, rarely of thoughts, words, or scenes, while recollection is peculiarly appropriate for the act of recalling mental operations. See remember.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun The faculty of the mind by which it retains the knowledge of previous thoughts, impressions, or events.
• noun The reach and positiveness with which a person can remember; the strength and trustworthiness of one's power to reach and represent or to recall the past.
• noun The actual and distinct retention and recognition of past ideas in the mind; remembrance
• noun The time within which past events can be or are remembered.
• noun Something, or an aggregate of things, remembered; hence, character, conduct, etc., as preserved in remembrance, history, or tradition; posthumous fame.
• noun obsolete A memorial.
• noun [Obs.] to put on record; to record.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun uncountable The ability of an organism to record information about things or events with the facility of recalling them later at will.
• noun A record of a thing or an event stored and available for later use by the organism.
• noun computing The part of a computer that stores variable executable code or data (RAM) or unalterable executable code or default data (ROM).
• noun The time within which past events can be or are remembered.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun an electronic memory device
• noun something that is remembered
• noun the cognitive processes whereby past experience is remembered
• noun the area of cognitive psychology that studies memory processes
• noun the power of retaining and recalling past experience