LOLcats Meme

What does the LOLcats meme mean?

LOLcats are photographs of cats overlaid with captions written in lolspeak — deliberate misspellings and baby grammar ("I can has cheezburger?", "kthxbai"). The captions project a funny inner voice onto the cat: greedy, entitled, and cheerfully stupid. Replying with a LOLcat usually means "this is silly/adorable" rather than making a sharp point.

Origin

• Early 2007: Cat photos with misspelled captions circulate on 4chan and humor blogs.
• Early 2007: The image "I Can Has Cheezburger?" — a cat asking for a cheeseburger in broken English — becomes the format's defining example and gives the genre its catchphrase.
• May 2007: icanhascheezburger.com launches as a reader-submission site (later part of Cheezburger Network) and industrializes the format; "LOL" + "cat" gives it the name.
• After 2007: The lolspeak vocabulary (kthxbai, do want, oh noes) enters general internet slang even as the caption format itself matures.

Examples

• A cat staring at empty food bowl: "MAI FOOD BOWL IS EMPTY. I HAS A SAD."
• Two cats side by side: "PROBLEM?" / "I HAS IT."
• A pet doing something dumb captioned as a confident plan gone wrong.

Translation

• Literal reading: a cat with grammatically broken text asking for cheeseburger.
• Actual meaning: a cute photo played for laugh — the cat is "speaking" in its own silly dialect.
• Cross-language note: lolspeak is rarely translated; many languages keep the English caption and locally invent their own misspelling rules instead.

FAQ

What are LOLcats?

Cat photos captioned in deliberate misspelled baby-talk, the most famous being "I Can Has Cheezburger?"

When did LOLcats start?

Early 2007 on 4chan and humor blogs; the icanhascheezburger.com site launched in May 2007.

Why is the spelling wrong on purpose?

Because broken grammar is the joke — it gives the cat a food-obsessed, childlike voice.