Caturday

2005Weekly image posting tradition / image macroclassic

Published March 10, 2026 · Updated March 23, 2026

Also known as: Caturday Meme

Caturday is the internet tradition of posting cat images and LOLcat memes every Saturday. The practice started on 4chan's /b/ board around 2005, spread through communities like LiveJournal and I Can Has Cheezburger, and turned into a weekly internet ritual still observed across social media. The hashtag #Caturday trends on Twitter most weekends, with users sharing photos and memes of their cats1.

Overview

Caturday is a weekly ritual where users flood image boards, blogs, and social feeds with photos of cats on Saturdays3. The format ranges from plain snapshots of house cats to LOLcat image macros with broken-English captions layered on top. Anonymous posters on 4chan's /b/ board treated the day as an unofficial holiday, badgering the board to 'post some fucking cats'2.

By October 2011 the LiveJournal Caturday community had grown to around 2,196 members swapping macros and pet photos on a set schedule3. Cheezburger properties, Tumblr, and Twitter later folded the same idea into their tagging systems, so a Saturday scroll through #caturday brought a fresh wave of cat content on any given week3.

Origin & Background

Platform
4chan /b/
Creator
Unknown
Date
2005

Tracing the exact birth of Caturday involves multiple threads. The domain "caturday.com" was registered on April 30, 2005, and Time magazine's Lev Grossman placed the concept's roots in early that year after reader feedback corrected his initial estimate5. One of the first non-4chan uses of the name was a Blogspot blog called "Caturday" created November 16, 2005, by a New Hampshire user named Sharyn who posted stories and photos of her own cats rather than LOLcat macros4.

The meme tradition itself, posting LOLcat image macros on Saturdays, took root on 4chan's /b/ board1. A LiveJournal community launched on February 5, 2006, with the rallying cry "Post some fucking cats!"3. Urban Dictionary's first definition appeared on October 24, 20066, and one of the earliest archived Caturday threads on 4chan dates to December 12 of that year4.

How It Spread

I Can Has Cheezburger launched in early 2007 and blew open the doors for LOLcat culture, posting cat content daily rather than just on Saturdays2. The site's first Caturday-tagged image went up on January 13, 2007, two days after launch4. That same year, the trend appeared on MetaFilter, Fark, and in the University of Pennsylvania's student newspaper8. By mid-2007, search interest for the term hit its all-time peak.

A Caturday Tumblr blog appeared on June 1, 2009, billing itself as "probably the best cat blog in the world"7. Through the 2010s, #Caturday became a regular trending hashtag on Twitter1. By 2021, Metro News reported it was trending most Saturdays, with users sharing cat photos to an audience well beyond 4chan's original community1.

Platforms

4chanRedditTumblrTwitterInstagram
View on Google Trends

How to Use This Meme

The common convention is simple: on any Saturday, post a cat. That typically means a snapshot of your own cat, a favorite LOLcat image macro, or a repost from an older 4chan or Cheezburger thread. On Tumblr and Twitter, the post often includes the #caturday tag so it lands in the running Saturday feed alongside everyone else's cats3.

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