Doge (meme)
Doge is an internet meme built on a photograph of Kabosu, a Shiba Inu in Japan, glancing sideways at the camera. In its usual form the picture is surrounded by short phrases in multicolored Comic Sans, written in a deliberately broken English that pairs one of a small set of modifiers with a word it cannot modify, such as "such fluff" or "very concern", and often ends with "wow".[1] The site Know Your Meme named it the top meme of 2013. Its popularity peaked in 2014, and in December 2013 it became the emblem of a cryptocurrency, Dogecoin.
Origin
Kabosu was a rescue dog adopted in 2008 by Atsuko Sato, a kindergarten teacher in Sakura, Chiba Prefecture. Sato posted the photograph in an entry on her blog on February 13, 2010.[2] The word is older than the picture. The spelling "doge", for "dog", appeared in June 2005 in an episode of the puppet series made by the creators of the web cartoon Homestar Runner. In October 2010 a post on Reddit used it for a picture of a corgi, and in September 2012 a Tumblr blog, Shiba Confessions, reused Kabosu's photograph with Comic Sans captions. Searches for the meme rose sharply in July 2013.[1]
The grammar is consistent enough to describe. Each phrase uses one of five words, "so", "such", "many", "much" and "very", and sets it before a noun, verb or adjective it does not fit, as an inner monologue of the dog.[1]
Later history
Dogecoin was started in December 2013 by the programmers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, as a joke at the expense of the cryptocurrencies then multiplying, and it was the first to be based on an internet meme. Its logo is a version of Kabosu's head. In its first months its users raised money in it for several causes, among them the trip of the Jamaican bobsled team to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The coin outlived the joke: by the 2020s it was traded on major exchanges, and the original photograph was sold as a non-fungible token in 2021.[1]
A statue of Kabosu was installed in Sakura in 2023, and a manhole cover with her picture followed in 2024. She died of leukemia on May 24, 2024, at the age of 18.[2][1]
Molecular Reality Corporation
The memo "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest", which Molecular Reality Corporation published in 2022, lists eight planned games, each with a field of science, a set of samples and its inspirations. The seventh, DogeBio, covers canine biology, with "Dog biosamples, rapamycin metabolites, dog food" as its samples. Its illustration shows a curly-coated white dog with its tongue out and its paws on a ledge, which is not a Shiba Inu.[3] In 2026 the company's quiz, JeoPOREdy!, filed a clue about lysozyme, the enzyme in saliva that breaks open bacteria, under the category "Doge Bio".[4] A plan of May 2026 for universe wrappers, new art and story laid over the software of Maxine's Quest, listed "DogeBio (poop)" and relabeled the instrument's voltage knob "Sniff intensity".[5]
The word was coined in 2005, the photograph was taken in 2010, and the coin was launched in 2013. DogeBio gives its inspiration as "An actual game of fetch with our Chief Quadruped Officer, who was named 'Doge' IRL years before the coin was a thing."[3]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e "Doge (meme)". Wikipedia. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
- ^ a b "Kabosu, the dog who defined Doge, dead at age 18". Rolling Stone. May 24, 2024.
- ^ a b "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2022.
- ^ "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. May 2026.