Doge (meme) facts for kids
Doge (usually dohj dohg or dohzh) is an Internet meme that became popular in 2013. The meme typically consists of a picture of Kabosu, a Shiba Inu dog, accompanied by multicolored text in Comic Sans font in the foreground. The text, representing a kind of internal monolog, is deliberately written in a form of broken English.
The meme is based on a 2010 photograph and became popular in late 2013, being named as Know Your Meme's "top meme" of that year. The Shiba Inu had a notable presence in popular culture in late 2013, including a cryptocurrency based on Doge, the Dogecoin, launching in December of that year. Several online polls and media outlets recognized Doge as one of the best Internet memes of the 2010s.
Structure
Doge uses two-word phrases in which the first word is almost always one of five modifiers ("so", "such", "many", "much", and "very"), and the departure from correct English is to use the modifier with a word that it cannot properly modify. For example, "Much respect. So noble." uses the Doge modifiers but is not "proper" Doge because the modifiers are used in a formally correct fashion; the Doge version would be "Much noble, so respect." In addition to these phrases, a Doge utterance often ends with a single word, most often "wow" but with "amaze" and "excite" also being used.
Since the inception of the meme, several variations and spin-offs have been created.
Origin and pronunciation
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Kabosu and Atsuko Sato in 2023
|
|
| Other name(s) | Kabo-chan (かぼちゃん) |
|---|---|
| Species | Dog |
| Breed | Shiba Inu |
| Sex | Female |
| Born | November 2, 2005 |
| Nation from | Japan |
| Notable role | Internet celebrity |
| Years active | 2010–present |
Kabosu (Japanese: かぼす, born c. November 2, 2005), the female Shiba Inu featured in the original meme, is a pedigree dog who was sent to an animal shelter when her puppy mill shut down. She was adopted in 2008 by Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato, and named after the citrus fruit kabosu because Sato thought she had a round face like the fruit. Another Shiba Inu featured in the meme is Suki, a female belonging to photographer Jonathan Fleming from San Francisco. His wife had accidentally put a scarf in the wash, making it shrink. He took a photograph of Suki wearing the scarf outside on a cold night in February 2010.
Kabosu was first pictured in a 2010 blog post by Sato; afterward, variations of the pictures using overlaid Comic Sans text were posted from a Tumblr blog, Shiba Confessions. However, the use of the intentionally misspelled "Doge" dates back to June 2005, when it was mentioned in an episode of Homestar Runner's puppet series. The meme began to grow in popularity after it was used on Reddit in October 2010.
Some of the other characters used in the meme are based on photographs of real dogs. Cheems is based on an image of a dog named Balltze, from Hong Kong; he was adopted at the age of one and was nine years old in 2020. Walter is based on the bull terrier Nelson, who originally became popular in 2018 after his owner, Victoria Leigh, posted a picture of Nelson to Twitter, with the caption "When u open the front-facing camera on accident." In 2020, rumors of Nelson's death began to circulate the internet, although they turned out to be false. It was reported in late December 2022 that 17-year-old Kabosu was seriously ill with leukemia.
The most common pronunciations of "Doge" are dohj and dohg. In non-English speaking countries, "Doge" is occasionally pronounced "dodge". Those unfamiliar or unacquainted with the meme also use the pronunciations "doggie" DOG-ay DOH-gay, or simply like the word "dog" itself, i.e. dog or dawg.
History and spread
Online searches for the meme began to increase in July 2013. The meme was ranked at No. 12 on MTV's list of "50 Things Pop Culture Had Us Giving Thanks For" in 2013. On December 13, Doge was named the "top meme" of 2013 by Know Your Meme.
In December 2013, the Dogecoin was introduced as a new cryptocurrency, making it the first cryptocurrency to be based on an Internet meme.
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In 2021, the NFT of the original Doge meme was acquired by PleasrDAO and Doge NFT was fractionalized into $DOG token.
Cultural depictions
In mid-2014, the advertisement agency DDB Stockholm had Doge featured prominently in an advertising campaign for the public transport company SL in Stockholm, Sweden. The advertisement concerned the company's special summer tickets, and featured Doge holding a public transport ticket in his mouth, with phrases such as "many summer", "such cheap" and "very buy".
Google created a Doge Easter egg: when doge meme was entered into the YouTube search bar, all the site's text would be displayed in colorful Comic Sans, similar to the kind used by the meme. In January 2014, Sydney-based web developers Katia Eirin and Bennett Wong created Doge Weather, a weather website and mobile app incorporating the meme. Doge Weather reports the temperature and weather conditions based on the user's geographic location. In April 2014, Doge Weather became available as a mobile app for iOS 7. Mozilla's Servo project incorporated the meme into the project logo from May 2016 to February 2020.
Between April 3 and 7, 2023, Twitter's bird logo was replaced with an image of Doge for website users, for reasons not explained. Some speculated that it may have been a late-posted April Fools' Day joke.
See also
In Spanish: Doge para niños
