Etymology

memory hole

mem·o·ry hole

Today it means: A figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up; nowhere, oblivion. Full definition →

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The story

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.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.