page_title: Lolcat
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Lolcat / History
caption_attribution_description: English: What's Delaying My Dinner postcard, 1905. Early example of a lolcat-style image.
context_page_description: A lolcat, or LOLcat, is an image macro of one or more cats. The image's text is often idiosyncratic and intentionally grammatically incorrect, and is known as lolspeak.
  Lolcat is a compound word of the acronymic abbreviation LOL and the word "cat". A synonym for lolcat is cat macro or cat meme, since the images are a type of image macro and also a well-known genre of meme. Lolcats are commonly designed for photo sharing imageboards and other Internet forums.
context_section_description: British portrait photographer Harry Pointer created a carte de visite series featuring cats posed in various situations in the early 1870s. To these he usually added amusing text intended to further enhance their appeal. Other notable early figures include Harry Whittier Frees and (using mounted animals) Walter Potter.
  The first recorded use of the term "lolcat" was used on 4chan, an anonymous imageboard. The word "Lolcat" was in use as early as June 2006, and the domain name lolcats.com was registered on June 14, 2006. Their popularity was spread through usage on forums such as Something Awful. The News Journal states that "some trace the lolcats back to the site 4chan, which features bizarre cat pictures on Saturdays, or 'Caturdays'." Ikenburg adds that the images have been "slinking around the Internet for years under various labels, but they did not become a sensation until early 2007 with the advent of I Can Has Cheezburger?" The first image on "I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER?" was posted on January 11, 2007, and was allegedly from the Something Awful website." Lev Grossman of Time wrote that the oldest known example "probably dates to 2006", but later corrected himself in a blog post where he recanted his statement based on the anecdotal evidence readers had sent him, placing the origin of "Caturday" and many of the images now known by a few as "lolcats" in early 2005. The domain name "caturday.com" was registered on April 30, 2005.
  The term lolcat gained national media attention in the United States when it was covered by Time, which wrote that non-commercialized phenomena of the sort are increasingly rare, stating that lolcats have "a distinctly old-school, early 1990s, Usenet feel to [them]". Entertainment Weekly put them on its end-of-the-decade, "best-of" list, saying, "Da cutest distractshun of da decaid? Y, lolcats of corse! We can neber haz enuf of deez capshioned pics of cuddlie kittehs." "Lolcat" was also a runner-up under the "Most Creative" category under the American Dialect Society Word of the Year Awards, losing out to
  "Googlegänger".
  In December 2014, the word lolcat entered the Oxford English Dictionary, appearing in its online version.
caption: 1905 cat postcard by Harry Whittier Frees
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