Doge (meme)

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2013 · A 2010 photo on a Japanese dog owner's blog, captioned on Tumblr and spread through Reddit and 4chan · Also known as Kabosu; Shiba Inu meme; pieseł (Poland); Ironic Doge; Dogelore

What it is

Doge is a photo of a Shiba Inu, a Japanese breed of dog, glancing sideways at the camera with raised eyebrows and a wary, sly look. Around her, people wrote short phrases in bright colours in Comic Sans, a cartoonish typeface: "such wow", "very scare", "much noble". The words were meant as the dog's own thoughts, in deliberately broken English, as if a dog had learned the language badly. The dog in the original photo was called Kabosu.

Where it came from

Atsuko Sato, a teacher in Japan, posted the photo of her rescue dog Kabosu on her blog in 2010. The misspelling "doge" had already appeared in a 2005 Homestar Runner cartoon and a 2010 Reddit post about a corgi. Captioned versions turned up on a Tumblr blog called Shiba Confessions, and in 2013 the format spread fast across Reddit, Tumblr and 4chan. Know Your Meme, a site that catalogues memes, named it the top meme of 2013. By December members of the US Congress were posting it, and Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency named after it, launched the same month.

How people used it

The rules were simple. Use one of five words (so, such, many, much, very) with a word it can't grammatically go with, then finish with "wow". People put the captions on their own pets, on celebrities and on the news, and typed the phrases in comments with no picture at all. Newspapers wrote headlines like "very vroom" when Dogecoin fans paid for a NASCAR car in 2014. On Weibo in China it became an emoji for sly sarcasm. Later, Reddit's r/dogelore built a cast of ironic characters around it, including Cheems and Walter, and in 2020 "Swole Doge vs. Cheems" used a muscular Doge and a feeble Cheems to compare a tough past with a weak present.

Why it mattered

Anyone could learn to write Doge from one example, so everyone did. It survived its 2014 peak by changing shape. Dogecoin was started by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a joke about cryptocurrency, then attracted real money, especially after Elon Musk began posting about it in 2021. Kabosu became one of the most recognised dogs in the world, and Twitter briefly swapped its bird logo for her face in 2023. When she died in 2024, people across the internet posted tributes to a dog most of them had only known as a caption.

The jokes around it

• "Such wow. Very scare. Much amaze. Wow."
• Cheems, another Shiba Inu who stuffs extra M's into words: "burmger".
• Walter, a Bull Terrier who likes "fire trucks and moster trucks".
• Swole Doge vs. Cheems: the strong old version of a thing next to its weak modern version.
• "To the moon", the Dogecoin fans' catchphrase.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People loved a joke with rules they could learn in seconds and then bend. Doge lasted because each group that found it remade it for itself, until the same photo of one Japanese dog was a grammar game, a set of ironic cartoon characters and a currency people half joked about and half bet on.

What noah is not sure of

Kabosu's death is recorded as May 2024. Atsuko Sato is widely reported to be a kindergarten teacher. The exact date the Shiba Confessions Tumblr first captioned the photo isn't certain, and how to pronounce "Doge" was never settled.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.