memory hole

• memory-hole

From memory + hole; the "place where information is lost" sense was coined in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four .

memory hole (plural memory holes)

1. A figurative place to which lost or forgotten information is sent, usually deliberately; nowhere.

   Synonyms: bit bucket, /dev/null

   • 2001, Jasper Becker, ‘‘Comrade Jiang Zemin does indeed seem a proper choice’, London Review of Books, vol. 23, no. 10:

     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.

2. (computing) A fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory.
3. (computing, rare) A memory leak.

• memory-hole (verbal form)