LOLcats

Lolcats are a type of Internet meme consisting of photographs of cats, often accompanied by humorous captions written in intentionally broken English known as lolspeak. The captions typically imagine the cat’s thoughts or describe actions in a playful, anthropomorphic way.

The meme rose to prominence in the mid-2000s with the launch of I Can Has Cheezburger?, a website started by Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unekel. Users submitted captioned cat photos, and the site popularized a recognizable image-macro format—pictures paired with humorous text, frequently appearing at the top and bottom of the image. The phrase “I can haz cheeseburger?” became a widely cited example of the style, helping to popularize the broader LOLcat phenomenon.

Lolspeak, the characteristic language of lolcats captions, features deliberate misspellings, phonetic rendering, and playful grammar. Examples include “haz,” “cheezburger,” and “z,” used to convey a quirky, childlike voice. This language contributed to the meme’s distinct identity and influenced later captions and stylized text across online communities.

Culturally, lolcats contributed to the growth of image macros and user-generated humor on the early social web. The success of I Can Has Cheezburger? spawned the Cheezburger Network, a family of humor sites that expanded the format beyond cats to other topics. While activity on the original sites waned in later years, lolcats remain a recognizable reference point in Internet meme history and are frequently discussed as an early example of user-generated meme culture.