The term "meme" was introduced in 1976 by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene.

He needed a noun to describe the concept of the transmission of an idea and initially toyed with the Green word "mimeme", meaning imitation. But he wanted a shorter word similar to the English "gene" and came up with "meme".

Today, "meme" is identified as a "funny image, video, or text that is copied (often with slight variations), thatbis spread rapidly and widely by interest users, usually through social media."

In other words, a meme is an online joke.

So, a meme coin is a Cryptocurrency based on an online joke. 

What's the difference between meme coins and cryptocurrencies?

Meme coins are actually cryptocurrencies. The biggest difference is that meme coins attract a lot more attention due to their association with celebrities and online influencers.

They also tend to have a huge and passionate community behind them similar to global sports team. Meme coins have proven to their haters to never dismiss the power of a loyal fan base with diamond hands.

Meme coins share common traits, that's;

• They have huge circulating supply , often in the quadrillions. 
• Due to such a huge circulating supply, most meme coins are priced way below $1 .... in fraction pennies. For example, SHIB's price is $0.00002692
• Such a low price is what makes meme coins attractive to a lot of crypto traders. They can own thousands, even millions, of a meme coin and then dream that the meme coin's price will go up to 1000 times or more.

Don't be foooled though and start dreaming about riches. Prices of meme coins are extremely volatile, and many of them have fallen 90% or more, especially if they end up being "shitcoins".

They have been examples of shady folks who create new coins, but hold all or most of the supply. They hype the coin online with memes and marketing to attract retail buyers, then dump their holdings on the unsuspecting community.  Classic pump-and-dump behaviour.