Do you know the famous Doge from the memes?

Doge is a slang term used to refer to a dog — I think everyone who spent time on the internet already knows that. Around 2013, funny images started appearing with monologues that were funny, serious, sarcastic… in various colors, written in Comic Sans. That mix stuck to photos of Shiba Inu dogs, and a viral swarm of memes followed.

For those who don't know, a Shiba Inu is a Japanese dog breed that is quite bold, independent, and full of self-confidence. The face that made the format famous, though, belongs to a real dog with a name: Kabosu, sitting on a sofa and looking sideways at the camera as if she had just caught you doing something mildly stupid.

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How did the Doge meme originate and spread?

We know the word. Now we need the dog. The misspelling showed up on June 24, 2005, in a Homestar Runner puppet short called “Biz Cas Fri 1,” when Homestar calls Strong Bad his “doge.” The joke spelling sat around until it collided with pictures of dogs.

In October 2010, a Reddit post titled LMBO LOOK @ THIS FUKKIN DOGE used the word on a photo of a Welsh Corgi — not Kabosu. Later write-ups often glue that title onto the sofa photo. They are two different images. The misspelling stuck to silly dog pictures first; the Shiba face that everyone now calls Doge came from Japan.

Kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato (佐藤 敦子) adopted Kabosu in 2008 from a shelter after a puppy mill closed. A volunteer had named her after the citrus fruit kabosu (かぼす), because of her round face, and Sato kept the name. In February 2010 she posted photos on her personal blog. One of them showed Kabosu on a sofa, paws crossed, eyebrows raised, looking sideways at the camera.

In 2013, another dog of the same breed named Suki, from photographer Jonathan Fleming in San Francisco, went viral and boosted the meme: a compact Shiba in a shrunken purple scarf against city lights. Two dogs, two photos, same fox-faced energy. Kabosu’s sofa shot is the one most people mean when they say Doge.

The colorful Comic Sans captions crystallized on Tumblr, especially on Shiba Confessions from 2012: funny text over unrelated pictures of Shibas. A user posted an audio clip of a computer voice “encountering a doge,” like a turn-based game; by July 2013 it had tens of thousands of notes. A blog called YourDailyDoge appeared, fake Pokémon battle videos used the voice, and 4chan threads filled with dogs in different outfits. By late 2013, Kabosu’s face was everywhere.

How Doge-speak actually works

The picture is only half of it. Doge-speak is a tiny broken English that pretends to be the dog’s inner monologue. The usual modifiers are so, such, many, much, and very, paired with a word they should not modify. “Much respect, so noble” is too correct. The joke is “much noble, so respect.” A lone wow — or amaze, or excite — often sits in a corner, in Comic Sans, in a color that has nothing to do with the rest of the image.

That grammar is why the meme is easy to copy and hard to fake well. If the modifiers land on the right nouns, you get the Shiba’s slightly unhinged confidence. If they don’t, you just get a dog with ugly text.

The breed itself helps. Shiba Inu and Akita Inu share the fox face and the independent streak; Shiba is the smaller of Japan’s native dogs. Online they got nicknamed shibes. In Japanese, dog is simply 犬 (inu) — the meme added the extra vowel and never looked back.

Curiosities involving Doge

The truth is that plenty of funny dog pictures received the title of Doge. Companies played with the look, people used it for politics, and a subreddit grew around Shiba Inu photos. A few details are worth keeping straight:

• In December 2013 someone launched Dogecoin, a joke cryptocurrency with Kabosu’s face on the coin, in the same family as Bitcoin. The joke outlived the punchline.
• YouTube added an Easter egg around that period: searching for “doge meme” painted the site’s text in rainbow Comic Sans. Treat that as a 2013 trick, not a promise that it still fires on every device.
• On April Fool’s Day in 2017, a hoax story claimed the original Doge had died. The joke landed because Kabosu was still alive. On May 24, 2024, Sato wrote that Kabosu had actually died, at about 18, after leukemia and liver disease. She passed in Sakura, in Chiba Prefecture, as if falling asleep while being petted.

Sato’s goal, when the meme first found her, was not coins or captions. She wanted people to notice shelters and puppy mills. Kabosu had been a pedigreed dog headed for a bad ending; the internet borrowed her face and mostly forgot the rest.

The language is still around — in spin-off characters, in coins, in jokes that barely need the photo. The dog got a long life with a kindergarten teacher outside Tokyo. That split is the part the captions never explained: Doge is a face on a screen. Kabosu was a Shiba who liked being photographed.