Doge
From Chan Top List, the imageboard wiki.
Doge is an image-macro meme that pairs a 2010 photograph of a Shiba Inu dog named Kabosu with brightly colored Comic Sans captions written in fragmentary English ('such wow', 'much meme'). The meme rose to prominence in 2013 through Tumblr, Reddit, and imageboards, and later inspired the Dogecoin cryptocurrency.
Origin
The source photograph was taken in February 2010 by Kabosu's owner, Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato, and posted to her personal blog. Years later the image was rediscovered and circulated as a reaction image, eventually settling into the captioned 'doge' format.
Cross-platform spread
Unlike many earlier memes, Doge spread roughly simultaneously on Tumblr, Reddit, and 4chan, making it one of the first major memes whose origin path is genuinely cross-platform rather than primarily imageboard-driven.
Dogecoin
Software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer launched the cryptocurrency Dogecoin in December 2013 as a parody of the cryptocurrency boom, using Doge as its mascot. Kabosu died in May 2024.
External links
See also
- Lolcats and Image Macros — Cat photos with overlaid captions in broken English; the format that established image macros as the dominant meme genre of the 2000s.
- /b/ — 4chan's original 'random' board, the chaotic engine room of the early imageboard internet.
This page was last updated on April 29, 2026.