A lolcat (pronounced ), or LOLcat, is an

image macro An image macro is a piece of digital media featuring a picture, or artwork, with some form of text superimposed. The text frequently appears at the top and bottom of the image. Image macros are one of the most common forms of internet memes, and ...

of one or more

cat The cat (''Felis catus'') is a domestic species of small carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticated species in the family Felidae and is commonly referred to as the domestic cat or house cat to distinguish it from the wild members of ...

s. Lolcat images'

idiosyncratic An idiosyncrasy is an unusual feature of a person (though there are also other uses, see below). It can also mean an odd habit. The term is often used to express eccentricity or peculiarity. A synonym may be "quirk". Etymology The term "idiosyncr ...

and intentionally grammatically incorrect text is known as lolspeak. Lolcat is a

compound word In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word or sign) that consists of more than one stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes. Compounding occurs when ...

of the acronymic abbreviation LOL (laugh out loud) and the word "cat". A synonym for lolcat is cat macro or cat meme, since the images are a type of

and also a well-known genre of

meme A meme ( ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ...

. Lolcats are commonly designed for

photo sharing Image sharing, or photo sharing, is the publishing or transfer of digital photos online. Image sharing websites offer services such as uploading, hosting, managing and sharing of photos (publicly or privately). This function is provided through ...

imageboard An imageboard is a type of Internet forum that focuses on the posting of images, often alongside text and discussion. The first imageboards were created in Japan as an extension of the textboard concept. These sites later inspired the creation of ...

s and other

Internet forums An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...

History

Harry Whittier Frees - What's Delaying My Dinner

British portrait

photographer A photographer (the Greek φῶς (''phos''), meaning "light", and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light") is a person who makes photographs. Duties and types of photographers As in oth ...

Harry Pointer created a

carte de visite The ''carte de visite'' (, visiting card), abbreviated CdV, was a type of small photograph which was patented in Paris by photographer André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri in 1854, although first used by Louis Dodero. Each photograph was the siz ...

series featuring cats posed in various situations in the early 1870s. To these he usually added amusing text intended to further enhance their appeal. Other notable early figures include

Harry Whittier Frees Harry Whittier Frees (1879–1953) was an American photographer who created novelty postcards, magazine spreads, and children's books based on his photographs of posed animals. Early life Frees was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1879, after ...

and (using mounted animals)

Walter Potter Walter Potter (2 July 1835 – 21 May 1918) was an English taxidermist noted for his anthropomorphic dioramas featuring mounted animals mimicking human life, which he displayed at his museum in Bramber, Sussex, England. The exhibition was a we ...

. The first recorded use of the term "lolcat" was used on

4chan 4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. Launched by Christopher "moot" Poole in October 2003, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from anime and manga to video games, cooking, weapons, television, ...

, an anonymous

. The word "Lolcat" was in use as early as June 2006; the

domain name A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...

lolcats.com was registered on June 14, 2006. Their popularity was spread through usage on forums such as

Something Awful ''Something Awful'' (SA) is an American comedy website hosting content including blog entries, Internet forum, forums, feature articles, digitally edited pictures, and humorous media reviews. It was created by Richard Kyanka, Richard "Lowtax" K ...

. ''

The News Journal ''The News Journal'' is the main newspaper for Wilmington, Delaware, and the surrounding area. It is headquartered in unincorporated New Castle County, Delaware, near New Castle, and is owned by Gannett. History The ancestry of the News Jo ...

'' states that "some trace the lolcats back to the site 4chan, which features bizarre cat pictures on Saturdays, or 'Caturdays'." Ikenburg adds that the images have been "slinking around the Internet for years under various labels, but they did not become a sensation until early 2007 with the advent of I Can Has Cheezburger?" The first image on "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?" was posted on January 11, 2007, and was allegedly from the

website." Lev Grossman of ''Time'' wrote that the oldest known example "probably dates to 2006", but later corrected himself in a blog post where he recanted his statement based on the anecdotal evidence readers had sent him, placing the origin of "Caturday" and many of the images now known by a few as "lolcats" in early 2005. The domain name "caturday.com" was registered on April 30, 2005. The term ''lolcat'' gained national media attention in the United States when it was covered by ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and event (philosophy), events that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various me ...

'', which wrote that non-commercialized

phenomena A phenomenon ( : phenomena) is an observable event. The term came into its modern philosophical usage through Immanuel Kant, who contrasted it with the noumenon, which ''cannot'' be directly observed. Kant was heavily influenced by Gottfried ...

of the sort are increasingly rare, stating that lolcats have "a distinctly old-school, early 1990s,

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it wa ...

feel to

hem A hem in sewing is a garment finishing method, where the edge of a piece of cloth is folded and sewn to prevent unravelling of the fabric and to adjust the length of the piece in garments, such as at the end of the sleeve or the bottom of the g ...

. Partial scan of the print edition
fcrunk.wellimean.com
''

Entertainment Weekly ''Entertainment Weekly'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''EW'') is an American digital-only entertainment magazine based in New York City, published by Dotdash Meredith, that covers film, television, music, Broadway theatre, books, and popular ...

'' put them on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "Da cutest distractshun of da decaid? Y, lolcats of corse! We can neber haz enuf of deez capshioned pics of cuddlie kittehs." "Lolcat" was also a runner-up under the "Most Creative" category under the

American Dialect Society The American Dialect Society (ADS), founded in 1889, is a learned society "dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, and of other languages, or dialects of other languages, influencing it or influenced by it." The Society p ...

Word of the Year Awards, losing out to "Googlegänger". In December 2014, the word ''lolcat'' entered the ''

Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a c ...

'', appearing in its online version.

Format

Lolcat is a compound word made from "lol" and "cat". "

Lol LOL, or lol, is an initialism for laughing out loud and a popular element of Internet slang. It was first used almost exclusively on Usenet, but has since become widespread in other forms of computer-mediated communication and even face-to ...

" stands for "Laugh out Loud" or "Laughing out Loud"; hence, lolcats are intended to be funny and to include jokes. Lolcats images comprise a photo of a cat with a large caption characteristically set in a heavy

sans serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif, gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than ser ...

font such as

Impact Impact may refer to: * Impact (mechanics), a high force or shock (mechanics) over a short time period * Impact, Texas, a town in Taylor County, Texas, US Science and technology * Impact crater, a meteor crater caused by an impact event * Imp ...

Arial Black Arial (also called Arial MT) is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts in the neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 3.1 on, some other Microsoft software appli ...

. The image is, on occasion, digitally edited for effect. The caption generally acts as a

speech balloon Speech balloons (also speech bubbles, dialogue balloons, or word balloons) are a graphic convention used most commonly in comic books, comics, and cartoons to allow words (and much less often, pictures) to be understood as representing a charac ...

encompassing a comment from the cat, or as a description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and grammar, featuring "conjugated verbs, but a tendency to converge to a new set of rules in spelling and grammar". The text parodies the grammar-poor

patois ''Patois'' (, pl. same or ) is speech or language that is considered nonstandard, although the term is not formally defined in linguistics. As such, ''patois'' can refer to pidgins, creoles, dialects or vernaculars, but not commonly to jargon o ...

stereotypically attributed to

Internet slang Internet slang (also called Internet shorthand, cyber-slang, netspeak, digispeak or chatspeak) is a non-standard or unofficial form of language used by people on the Internet to communicate to one another. An example of Internet slang is "LOL" m ...

. Frequently, lolcat captions take the form of

phrasal template A phrasal template is a phrase-long collocation that contains one or several empty slots which may be filled by words to produce individual phrases. Description A phrasal template is a phrase-long collocation that contains one or several empty s ...

s. Some phrases have a known source, usually a well-known

Internet meme An Internet meme, commonly known simply as a meme ( ), is an idea, behavior, style, or image that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. What is considered a meme may vary across different communities on the Internet ...

, such as

All your base are belong to us "All your base are belong to us" is an Internet meme based on a badly translated phrase from the opening cutscene of the video game ''Zero Wing''. The phrase first appeared on the European release of the 1991 Sega Mega Drive port of the 1989 ...

or Do not want, while others don't. The language of lolcats has also been likened to

baby talk Baby talk is a type of speech associated with an older person speaking to a child or infant. It is also called caretaker speech, infant-directed speech (IDS), child-directed speech (CDS), child-directed language (CDL), caregiver register, parent ...

, however it draws on a variety of linguistic resources, not just the imitation of baby talk. Common themes include jokes of the form "Im in ur oun

erb Erb, ERB or ErB may refer to: People * Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950), American author * Erb of Gwent (–), king of Gwent and Glywysing Surname * Abraham Erb (1772–1830), American-born Canadian settler * Albrecht Erb (1628–1714), Aus ...

ing ur elated noun" Many lolcat images capture cats performing characteristically human actions or appearing to use modern technology, such as computers. There are several well-known LOLcat images and single-word captions that have spawned many variations and imitations, including "Ceiling Cat" (see below). Others include

Fail Failure is the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, and may be viewed as the opposite of success. The criteria for failure depends on context, and may be relative to a particular observer or belief system. One ...

(a cat with a slice of

processed cheese Processed cheese (also known as process cheese, cheese food, prepared cheese, cheese product, or plastic cheese) is a food product made from cheese and unfermented dairy ingredients mixed with emulsifiers. Additional ingredients, such as vegeta ...

on its face) and " I Can Has Cheezburger" (a portrait of a blue

British Shorthair The British Shorthair is the pedigreed version of the traditional British domestic cat, with a distinctively stocky body, dense coat, and broad face. The most familiar colour variant is the "British Blue", with a solid grey-blue coat, orange eyes, ...

). Another popular format is " djectivecat is djective/noun"

Recurring characters

"Ceiling Cat" is a character spawned by the meme. The original image was an

with a picture of a cat looking out of a hole in a ceiling, captioned "Ceiling Cat is watching you

masturbate Masturbation is the sexual stimulation of one's own genitals for sexual arousal or other sexual pleasure, usually to the point of orgasm. The stimulation may involve hands, fingers, everyday objects, sex toys such as vibrators, or combination ...

." There followed numerous examples with the format "Ceiling Cat is watching you 'verb'' ending in / rhyming with -ate with Ceiling Cat superimposed in the upper left hand corner of an image macro depicting the appropriate action. The underlying theme is that the cat is looking down on one, almost in a form of judgment. "Ceiling Cat" and the corresponding "Basement Cat" (a

black cat A black cat is a domestic cat with black fur that may be a mixed or specific breed, or a common domestic cat of no particular breed. The Cat Fanciers' Association (CFA) recognizes 22 cat breeds that can come with solid black coats. The Bombay b ...

who lives in the basement) represent good and evil in the lolcat universe, and in some cases God and Satan, as in the LOLCat Bible Translation Project. ''Ceiling Cat'' by Eva & Franco Mattes, a 2016 taxidermy cat installation mimicking the meme, is in the collection of the

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...

Offshoots and parodies

Variations on the lolcat concept include captioning photos of other animals in a similar style (e.g. ''loldogs'' for dogs, etc.). The syntax of lolcat captions was used as the basis for LOLCODE, an

esoteric programming language An esoteric programming language (sometimes shortened to esolang) is a programming language designed to test the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, as software art, as a hacking interface to another language ...

with interpreters and compilers available in

.NET Framework The .NET Framework (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It was the predominant implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) until bein ...

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offic ...

, etc. In the Java edition of the video game

Minecraft ''Minecraft'' is a sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before b ...

, there is an option to change language settings to LOLCAT. Another example is

Polandball Countryballs, also known as Polandball, is an art style and internet meme used in online comic strips in which countries are typically personified as imperfect spherical characters (there are some exceptions, such as Israel, Nepal, Kazakhsta ...

, which uses broken English, reminiscent of the lolcat meme. lolcat, a variant of the Unix utility cat, outputs text in rainbow colours.

Notes

References

With 'LOLcats' Internet Fad, Anyone Can Get In on the Joke
''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'', August 25, 2007
If you give a cat a keyboard
''

Minneapolis Star Tribune The ''Star Tribune'' is the largest newspaper in Minnesota. It originated as the ''Minneapolis Tribune'' in 1867 and the competing ''Minneapolis Daily Star'' in 1920. During the 1930s and 1940s, Minneapolis's competing newspapers were consolida ...

'', July 26, 2007
Bloggers Bring in the Big Bucks
''

BusinessWeek ''Bloomberg Businessweek'', previously known as ''BusinessWeek'', is an American weekly business magazine published fifty times a year. Since 2009, the magazine is owned by New York City-based Bloomberg L.P. The magazine debuted in New York City ...

'', July 13, 2007 * *

External links

* * * {{Internet slang Cats in popular culture Animals on the Internet Internet slang Internet humor Photography by genre 4chan phenomena Internet memes introduced in 2006 2006 neologisms he:תופעת אינטרנט#Lolcat