Lolcats and Image Macros
From Chan Top List, the imageboard wiki.
Lolcats are humorous photographs of cats overlaid with captions written in a deliberately ungrammatical style sometimes called 'lolspeak'. The format predates 4chan but was popularized through 4chan's 'Caturday' tradition and the standalone site I Can Has Cheezburger, founded in 2007. Lolcats established the template-plus-caption 'image macro' as the dominant meme format of the late 2000s.
Caturday
On Saturdays, 4chan's /b/ board hosted threads in which users posted captioned cat photos. The tradition predates the term 'lolcat' and traces back to earlier forums such as Something Awful.
I Can Has Cheezburger
The 2007 launch of icanhascheezburger.com, named after a famous early lolcat, gave the format a centralized publishing venue and helped move it from imageboard subculture into mainstream visibility. The site spawned a network of related properties and influenced the design of subsequent meme aggregators.
Influence on meme format
The image-macro template — a single image with bold white captioned text top and bottom — became the default visual grammar of internet memes for nearly a decade and remains a recognizable shorthand for 'meme' in mainstream graphic design.
External links
See also
- /b/ — 4chan's original 'random' board, the chaotic engine room of the early imageboard internet.
- Rage Comics — User-generated four-panel comic format that dominated the imageboard and Reddit meme economy from 2008 to roughly 2013.
- Doge — Image-macro meme based on a 2010 photograph of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu, popular from 2013 onward.
This page was last updated on April 29, 2026.