Doge
Where it came from
A 2010 photo of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu, sitting on a couch in Japan with a sideways, skeptical expression. Became a meme in 2013 when people started adding fragments of broken-English inner monologue in multicolored Comic Sans all over the image.
A Shiba Inu looks up with intense side-eye. Around the dog, in rainbow Comic Sans, are scraps of its inner thoughts: "wow". "such meme". "very doge". "much confuse". The grammar is deliberately toddler-like — short adjective-noun fragments that never quite form a sentence — and that's the whole format. You pick a topic and narrate it as a confused dog trying to process it.
It became an entire dialect for a while. People started talking in "much X. very Y. so Z" in regular conversation, in headlines, in Twitter bios. Then Elon Musk named a cryptocurrency after it and things got weird. Kabosu, the real dog, passed away in 2024, and a whole generation of internet people mourned her sincerely.
As a meme format, Doge is mostly retired. The specific Comic Sans aesthetic is too 2013 to feel current anymore. But it's one of the most culturally important memes ever made — it basically invented the "stupid inner voice narration" format that basically everything riffs on now.
Search interest, over time
↳ data courtesy of google trends
