Definition of mnemonic

A word, rhyme, or other memory aid used to associate a complex or lengthy set of information with something that is simple and easy to remember. Mnemonics are widely used in computing. Programming languages other than machine language, for example, are known as symbolic languages because they use short mnemonics, such as ADD (for addition) and def (for define) to represent instructions and operations. Similarly, operating systems and applications based on typed commands use mnemonics to represent instructions to the program. MSDOS, for example, uses dir (for directory) to request a list of files.