Meaning
What does Doge mean?
Doge is an internet reaction meme featuring a Japanese Shiba Inu dog with an awkward/concerned look on its face and his front legs crossed.
The original meme is normally paired with short inner dialogues written in colourful Comic Sans font surrounding the dog. His inner dialogue is written in short, awkwardly presented phrases, as if they were said by the dog.
The “Doge” meme is often used as a reaction to various scenarios, and the short inner dialogues is the way “doge” would react to said scenario.
Origin
What's the origin of Doge?
The original “Doge” was the Shiba Inu named Kabosu, photographed by his owner Atsuko Sato in 2010.
His photo didn’t go viral until 2013, but after it did, it spread to every possible social platform on the Internet.
As a result, it won the “top meme” of the year title from Know Your Meme in the very same year.
The term “doge” stems from 2005, when a character from Homestar Runner’s puppet show misspelled “dog”. The grammatical failure suits the general presentation of the “doge” meme.
Spread & Usage
How did Doge spread?
In December 2013, developer Billy Markus released the Dogecoin, a new cryptocurrency which was supposed to be a joke crypto coin.
To everyone’s surprise, the crypto – meme parody rapidly gained its own community, and by January 2014 (in one month) it reached a capitalization of 60 million dollars (US).
In 2016, “doge” was voted Tumblr’s top 10 most shared memes of the year, and in 2019, the “best internet meme of the 2010’s” on a poll by The Tab.
External resources
- Know Your Meme – Doge
- Wikipedia – Doge (meme)