Lolcat

A photograph of a cat is captioned in deliberately broken English — misspelled, mis-conjugated, set in heavy sans-serif type across the image. The captions follow reusable templates: "I can has cheezburger?", "Im in ur [noun], [verb]-ing ur [noun]", "Ceiling Cat is watching you". The style acquired a name of its own, lolspeak, and a cast of recurring characters including Ceiling Cat and Basement Cat.

It first appeared in 2007, during early YouTube.

Lolcats are where the image macro stopped being a forum in-joke and became a public form. The convention began on 4chan, where Saturdays were "Caturday" and cat pictures were the day's posting; it spread through Something Awful; and in January 2007 the blog I Can Has Cheezburger? gave it an address anyone could reach without knowing an imageboard existed. Within months linguists were analysing lolspeak as a constructed dialect and Time was reporting on it as a mass phenomenon.

I Can Has Cheezburger? became the anchor of a commercial meme network; "lolcat" was a runner-up in the American Dialect Society's 2007 Word of the Year; the syntax was parodied into a programming language, LOLCODE. Every captioned reaction image that followed — Advice Animals, rage comics, the whole 2010s macro economy — inherited the grammar lolcats established.