Also known as: Doge · Shibe · Shiba Inu meme · Such doge · Super shibe
Doge is a 2013 image-macro meme of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu with multicolored Comic Sans captions in deliberately broken English.
Doge is an internet meme built around photos of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu, overlaid with colorful Comic Sans captions in deliberately broken English. The format took off in 2013 after years of quiet spread across Tumblr and Reddit, earning Know Your Meme's "top meme" of the year3. Kabosu's sideways glance launched a cryptocurrency worth billions, inspired an NFT sale of over $4 million, and gave its name to a U.S. government department, making it one of the most consequential memes in internet history.
The word "doge" as a playful misspelling of "dog" traces to June 24, 2005, when the puppet character Homestar Runner spelled out "d-o-g-e" while calling Strong Bad his friend in the episode "Biz Cas Fri 1". Strong Bad's baffled reply, "Your doge?! What are you talking about?" gave the misspelling its first documented use.
The image half of the equation arrived on February 13, 2010, when Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato posted photos of her rescue Shiba Inu, Kabosu, to her personal blog. Among those photos was a now-legendary shot: Kabosu sitting on a couch, glancing sideways at the camera with raised eyebrows and crossed paws. Kabosu had been rescued from a puppy mill shutdown in November 2008, one of 19 Shiba Inus sent to a shelter where most were euthanized. A volunteer from the organization Chiba-Wan saved her, and Sato adopted her, naming her after the Japanese citrus fruit her round face resembled.
On October 28, 2010, a Reddit user submitted a photo of a corgi to the /r/Ads subreddit with the title "LMBO LOOK @ THIS FUKKIN DOGE," pulling 266 upvotes and fusing the word "doge" with the concept of funny dog photos. Whether this post referenced Homestar Runner intentionally or was simply a typo is unknown, but the name stuck.
How It Spread
The meme developed slowly through 2012 before exploding in 2013. In April 2012, Tumblr user leonsumbitches uploaded an audio file of a computer reading a passage about encountering a "doge," paired with a dog photo, which collected over 33,000 notes. By summer 2012, doge threads were appearing on 4chan boards including /v/, and the Tumblr blog "Shiba Confessions" launched in September, pairing Shiba Inu photos with Comic Sans captions. The growth of Shiba Confessions helped establish the visual language that Doge would later adopt wholesale.
In August 2012, the Tumblr blog "F--k Yeah Doge" launched, followed by the subreddit /r/Doge in January 2013. Google Trends data shows interest in "doge" stayed flat until July 2013, when Kabosu's specific photo locked in as the meme's defining image. On July 29, 2013, a doge thread was sticky-featured on 4chan's /s4s/ board, drawing over 600 replies.
The meme crossed into mainstream awareness in August 2013 when 4chan's /b/ board raided Reddit's /r/Murica, flooding the subreddit with patriotic Doge photoshops. The moderators of /r/Murica mostly welcomed the invasion, with one writing: "4chan decided we wouldn't like this, or something. We totally do. FREEDOM OF SPEECH SUCKA". The Daily Dot covered the raid, and by late 2013, Doge was inescapable online.
In November 2013, YouTube implemented an Easter egg: searching "doge meme" turned all site text into colorful Comic Sans. By December, Know Your Meme crowned Doge its top meme of 2013. That same month, members of the U.S. Congress produced material in Doge's style, with Texas Representative Steve Stockman tweeting a Doge-ified image of Senator John Cornyn. The Huffington Post declared the meme "killed" by congressional usage.
Platforms
TumblrRedditTwitter9GAGFacebookInstagram
Timeline
2005-06-24
The word "doge" as a playful misspelling of "dog" first appeared when the puppet character Homestar Runner spelled out "d-o-g-e" while calling Strong Bad his friend in the episode "Biz Cas Fri 1."
2008-11-01
Kabosu, the Shiba Inu who would become the face of Doge, was rescued as one of 19 Shiba Inus sent to a shelter where most were euthanized.
2017-03-31
Chinese state broadcaster CCTV tweeted that Kabosu had died at age 16, drawing over 8,400 retweets, but the report was false.
2023-04-01
Elon Musk briefly replaced the Twitter bird logo with Kabosu's face, causing Dogecoin's value to swing by billions.
Doge crossed from internet joke to mainstream culture faster than almost any meme before it. In 2014, a California gaming company attempted to trademark the word "Doge" with the U.S. Patent Office, prompting the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Corynne McSherry to note the filing was problematic for attempting to trademark an entire common word.
The meme found particular resonance in China, where Weibo implemented Kabosu as an emoji. Chinese internet users interpreted her expression as enigmatic rather than comedic, and the emoji became widely used to convey whimsy or ambiguous sarcasm.
Dogecoin's cultural footprint dwarfed the meme itself. The cryptocurrency funded charitable causes, from the Jamaican bobsled team's Olympic trip to clean water projects in Kenya. SpaceX announced in May 2021 a rideshare mission to the Moon funded entirely by Dogecoin, making it the first space mission funded by cryptocurrency. The Dogecoin Foundation was re-established in 2021 with advisors including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and a representative of Elon Musk.
In 2023, Kyle Craven, the real person behind the Bad Luck Brian meme, met Kabosu during a trip to Japan, and the photo of two meme legends together went viral on its own.
Writing about Doge's legacy in The New Yorker after Kabosu's death, Kyle Chayka reflected that the meme "projected a sense of hopeful naïveté about the Internet which has lately disappeared from digital culture". Unlike modern viral content optimized for algorithmic promotion, Doge emerged organically, belonging "both to everyone and to no one".
After PleasrDAO bought the original Kabosu photograph NFT for approximately $4 million in 2021, a community called Own The Doge formed around the fractionalized $DOG token. The organization officially acquired the legal rights, licensing, and provenance for the iconic Kabosu "Doge" meme directly from Atsuko Sato. Rather than creating a standard memecoin, the DAO fractionalized the original Doge image NFT into $DOG tokens, allowing holders to digitally own a piece of the internet's favorite meme. The image was minted as an NFT, auctioned off by Sato and sold to the DAO that now holds the copyright and exclusive usage rights for the original Doge image, alongside additional Shiba Inu IP such as the Neiro rights.
In 2023 Own The Doge partnered with the National Day Calendar to make November 2 an official holiday, International Doge Day, timed to Kabosu's birthday. The inaugural celebration on November 2, 2023 marked Kabosu's 18th birthday and drew 23 fans who flew to Sakura, Japan for a mayoral opening, a Doge quiz, and a Q&A with fellow meme veterans Bad Luck Brian and Tay Zonday of "Chocolate Rain" fame. The centerpiece was a bronze statue of Kabosu in Sakura Hometown Square that took over a year and roughly $100,000 in community funds to commission, built in partnership with Atsuko Sato, Dogecoin, NFD, and Sakura City. Own The Doge framed the holiday around its "Do Only Good Everyday" ethos, which spells out DOGE, and the group says it has directed over $1 million to charitable causes including Save The Children. The Sakura celebration has run every November 2 since.
Also known as: Doge · Shibe · Shiba Inu meme · Such doge · Super shibe
Doge is a 2013 image-macro meme of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu with multicolored Comic Sans captions in deliberately broken English.
Doge is an internet meme built around photos of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu, overlaid with colorful Comic Sans captions in deliberately broken English. The format took off in 2013 after years of quiet spread across Tumblr and Reddit, earning Know Your Meme's "top meme" of the year. Kabosu's sideways glance launched a cryptocurrency worth billions, inspired an NFT sale of over $4 million, and gave its name to a U.S. government department, making it one of the most consequential memes in internet history.
The word "doge" as a playful misspelling of "dog" traces to June 24, 2005, when the puppet character Homestar Runner spelled out "d-o-g-e" while calling Strong Bad his friend in the episode "Biz Cas Fri 1". Strong Bad's baffled reply, "Your doge?! What are you talking about?" gave the misspelling its first documented use.
The image half of the equation arrived on February 13, 2010, when Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato posted photos of her rescue Shiba Inu, Kabosu, to her personal blog. Among those photos was a now-legendary shot: Kabosu sitting on a couch, glancing sideways at the camera with raised eyebrows and crossed paws. Kabosu had been rescued from a puppy mill shutdown in November 2008, one of 19 Shiba Inus sent to a shelter where most were euthanized. A volunteer from the organization Chiba-Wan saved her, and Sato adopted her, naming her after the Japanese citrus fruit her round face resembled.
On October 28, 2010, a Reddit user submitted a photo of a corgi to the /r/Ads subreddit with the title "LMBO LOOK @ THIS FUKKIN DOGE," pulling 266 upvotes and fusing the word "doge" with the concept of funny dog photos. Whether this post referenced Homestar Runner intentionally or was simply a typo is unknown, but the name stuck.
How It Spread
The meme developed slowly through 2012 before exploding in 2013. In April 2012, Tumblr user leonsumbitches uploaded an audio file of a computer reading a passage about encountering a "doge," paired with a dog photo, which collected over 33,000 notes. By summer 2012, doge threads were appearing on 4chan boards including /v/, and the Tumblr blog "Shiba Confessions" launched in September, pairing Shiba Inu photos with Comic Sans captions. The growth of Shiba Confessions helped establish the visual language that Doge would later adopt wholesale.
In August 2012, the Tumblr blog "F--k Yeah Doge" launched, followed by the subreddit /r/Doge in January 2013. Google Trends data shows interest in "doge" stayed flat until July 2013, when Kabosu's specific photo locked in as the meme's defining image. On July 29, 2013, a doge thread was sticky-featured on 4chan's /s4s/ board, drawing over 600 replies.
The meme crossed into mainstream awareness in August 2013 when 4chan's /b/ board raided Reddit's /r/Murica, flooding the subreddit with patriotic Doge photoshops. The moderators of /r/Murica mostly welcomed the invasion, with one writing: "4chan decided we wouldn't like this, or something. We totally do. FREEDOM OF SPEECH SUCKA". The Daily Dot covered the raid, and by late 2013, Doge was inescapable online.
In November 2013, YouTube implemented an Easter egg: searching "doge meme" turned all site text into colorful Comic Sans. By December, Know Your Meme crowned Doge its top meme of 2013. That same month, members of the U.S. Congress produced material in Doge's style, with Texas Representative Steve Stockman tweeting a Doge-ified image of Senator John Cornyn. The Huffington Post declared the meme "killed" by congressional usage.
Platforms
TumblrRedditTwitter9GAGFacebookInstagram
Timeline
2005-06-24
The word "doge" as a playful misspelling of "dog" first appeared when the puppet character Homestar Runner spelled out "d-o-g-e" while calling Strong Bad his friend in the episode "Biz Cas Fri 1."
2008-11-01
Kabosu, the Shiba Inu who would become the face of Doge, was rescued as one of 19 Shiba Inus sent to a shelter where most were euthanized.
2017-03-31
Chinese state broadcaster CCTV tweeted that Kabosu had died at age 16, drawing over 8,400 retweets, but the report was false.
2023-04-01
Elon Musk briefly replaced the Twitter bird logo with Kabosu's face, causing Dogecoin's value to swing by billions.
Doge crossed from internet joke to mainstream culture faster than almost any meme before it. In 2014, a California gaming company attempted to trademark the word "Doge" with the U.S. Patent Office, prompting the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Corynne McSherry to note the filing was problematic for attempting to trademark an entire common word.
The meme found particular resonance in China, where Weibo implemented Kabosu as an emoji. Chinese internet users interpreted her expression as enigmatic rather than comedic, and the emoji became widely used to convey whimsy or ambiguous sarcasm.
Dogecoin's cultural footprint dwarfed the meme itself. The cryptocurrency funded charitable causes, from the Jamaican bobsled team's Olympic trip to clean water projects in Kenya. SpaceX announced in May 2021 a rideshare mission to the Moon funded entirely by Dogecoin, making it the first space mission funded by cryptocurrency. The Dogecoin Foundation was re-established in 2021 with advisors including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and a representative of Elon Musk.
In 2023, Kyle Craven, the real person behind the Bad Luck Brian meme, met Kabosu during a trip to Japan, and the photo of two meme legends together went viral on its own.
Writing about Doge's legacy in The New Yorker after Kabosu's death, Kyle Chayka reflected that the meme "projected a sense of hopeful naïveté about the Internet which has lately disappeared from digital culture". Unlike modern viral content optimized for algorithmic promotion, Doge emerged organically, belonging "both to everyone and to no one".
After PleasrDAO bought the original Kabosu photograph NFT for approximately $4 million in 2021, a community called Own The Doge formed around the fractionalized $DOG token. The organization officially acquired the legal rights, licensing, and provenance for the iconic Kabosu "Doge" meme directly from Atsuko Sato. Rather than creating a standard memecoin, the DAO fractionalized the original Doge image NFT into $DOG tokens, allowing holders to digitally own a piece of the internet's favorite meme. The image was minted as an NFT, auctioned off by Sato and sold to the DAO that now holds the copyright and exclusive usage rights for the original Doge image, alongside additional Shiba Inu IP such as the Neiro rights.
In 2023 Own The Doge partnered with the National Day Calendar to make November 2 an official holiday, International Doge Day, timed to Kabosu's birthday. The inaugural celebration on November 2, 2023 marked Kabosu's 18th birthday and drew 23 fans who flew to Sakura, Japan for a mayoral opening, a Doge quiz, and a Q&A with fellow meme veterans Bad Luck Brian and Tay Zonday of "Chocolate Rain" fame. The centerpiece was a bronze statue of Kabosu in Sakura Hometown Square that took over a year and roughly $100,000 in community funds to commission, built in partnership with Atsuko Sato, Dogecoin, NFD, and Sakura City. Own The Doge framed the holiday around its "Do Only Good Everyday" ethos, which spells out DOGE, and the group says it has directed over $1 million to charitable causes including Save The Children. The Sakura celebration has run every November 2 since.