Before Memes Were Called Memes

In the mid-2000s, the word "meme" was mostly confined to academic discussions of evolutionary biology and cultural theory — Richard Dawkins had coined it in 1976. The average internet user wasn't thinking about memes. They were too busy looking at pictures of cats with grammatically disastrous captions.

LOLcats — images of cats paired with deliberately misspelled, childlike text — were among the first viral image formats that most people would now recognize as memes. Their rise is a fascinating chapter in internet history.

The Origins: Caturday and 4chan

The tradition of posting cat images online goes back to early internet forums, but LOLcats as a format coalesced around 2005–2006 on the image board 4chan. Users started a tradition called "Caturday" — posting cat images every Saturday. The images began featuring text in a broken, pidgin English that became known as "lolspeak."

The most iconic early LOLcat was the "I Can Has Cheezburger?" image — a round-faced cat (later identified as a British Shorthair) with the caption asking for a cheeseburger. It spread rapidly across early social media and blogs, and in 2007, a website of the same name launched to aggregate user-submitted LOLcats.

What Made LOLspeak Special?

Lolspeak wasn't random bad grammar — it had consistent internal rules that made it feel like a real dialect:

  • Nouns were often pluralized oddly: "bukkit" instead of "bucket"
  • Verbs were simplified: "I can has" instead of "Can I have"
  • "-z" endings replaced "-s": "cookiez," "cheezburger"
  • Phrases were written from the cat's first-person perspective

This consistency made lolspeak feel like a genuine community language. Participating in it meant understanding the rules — which is a hallmark of great meme formats.

I Can Has Cheezburger: The First Meme Empire

The I Can Has Cheezburger website became one of the most-visited sites on the internet at its peak. It spawned an entire network of humor blogs, book deals, and merchandise. Ben Huh, who bought the site in 2007, turned it into a media company that housed multiple meme-based properties.

This was arguably the first time anyone had built a significant commercial business on top of a meme format — a template that countless media companies would follow in the decade ahead.

LOLcats' Lasting Legacy

LOLcats did several important things for internet culture:

  1. Popularized the image macro format: Text overlaid on an image is now the default meme structure. LOLcats helped establish and normalize it.
  2. Showed that community language creates community: Lolspeak gave participants a shared tongue, deepening engagement.
  3. Proved animals = engagement: Cats remain among the most-shared content on the internet to this day. LOLcats proved this early.
  4. Demonstrated the commercial potential of memes: Before LOLcats, few imagined you could build a media business on viral images.

Where Are LOLcats Now?

The classic LOLcat format feels dated by today's standards — deliberately so. But the spirit lives on in every cat video, every pet meme, and every image macro posted online. Formats like "This is fine" (dog in burning room), surprised Pikachu, and others all owe a structural debt to the foundational work that LOLcats did in making image-based humor a primary mode of internet communication.

Next time you see a cat meme, tip your hat to the British Shorthair who just wanted a cheezburger.