memo

Pluralmemos

Formsmemos, memoing, memoed

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A short written note, often sent within an organization; a memorandum.

   He scribbled a memo reminding the team to submit their reports by Friday.

   The office circulated a memo outlining the updated safety procedures.

   Similarnote, memorandum, notice, circular

   Note

   A clipped form: memo is memorandum cut down to its first two syllables. The short word now does most of the everyday work, and its plural is simply memos. One collocation worth knowing is leaked memo, as in John Yoo's War by Other Means (2007). An internal note becomes news precisely because it was meant to stay inside the organization.

2. 2
   verbcolloquialtransitive

   To send someone a note about a matter so that there is a record of it.

   He memoed the whole department about the revised travel policy.

   Memo me the details and I'll add them to the project file.

   Similarnotify, message, email

3. 3
   verbcolloquialtransitive

   To record something; to make a note of it for future reference.

   He quickly memoed the key points from the phone call.

   I'll memo the changes so we don't lose track of them.

   Similarnote, record, log

   Note

   Verbed straight from the noun, it keeps its forms plain: memos, memoing, memoed, with no added e in the third person. It is an informal word, at home in office talk, and in careful writing note or record does the same job. Unlike sending a memo to someone, which takes a person as its object, this one takes the thing written down.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A stored record of partial results that a program can reuse later instead of recomputing it.

   Like a chef writing down a tricky sauce recipe once so they never have to figure out the proportions again.

   The function checks its memo before recomputing the same value.

   Storing each result as a memo cut the program's runtime dramatically.

   Note

   The program's note to itself, and the idea behind memoization in dynamic programming. The usual phrasing is locative. A result is stored in the memo or found in the memo, as when Daniel Zingaro's Algorithmic Thinking (2020) has a recursive call find its subproblem's solution there and return at once. The metaphor comes from the office note: a reminder written so the work need not be done twice.

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