The doge meme dog died peacefully by her owner’s side on Friday morning, according to Atsuko Sato’s latest blog post. The iconic Shiba Inu by the name of Kabosu, whose face graced one of the most well-known memes in internet history, reportedly fell into her final sleep as she listened to birds singing beside the window.
“Outside the window, birds were singing on a beautiful morning,” wrote Sato. “As I was touching her, she gently passed away.”
“I think she was the happiest dog in the world.”
Kabosu lived to the impressive age of 18 and had been fighting leukemia and liver disease since 2022. Long before the dog meme dog’s death, she secured her place as one of the most recognizable animals to appear online.
What is the Doge meme?
The Doge meme features a much younger Kabosu giving a side-eye look to the camera, often accompanied by odd and simple phrases beginning with “much” or “so” to express alarm or strong approval of something. This was nearly always capped with a single, lowercase “wow.”
The meme came together from a combination of that specific photo of Kabosu and the term “Doge,” coined in an episode of Homestar Runner nearly 20 years before the doge meme dog’s death.
Kabosu Doge meme origin
The word “Doge” first appeared on June 24, 2005 on Homestar Runner, a popular American webseries featuring cartoon characters known for taking common words and giving them a new twist. In the episode “Biz Cas Fri 1,” the title character attempts to refer to Strong Bad as “his dog” but spells it “d-o-g-e.”
“Your doge?” Strong Bad exclaims. “What are you talking about?”
Sato posted the photo of Kabosu that would come to be associated with the term on February 13, 2010. Later that year, on October 28, a Reddit user shared the photo to the r/Ads sub titled “LMBO LOOK @ THIS F—IN DOGE.”
The image can no longer be seen in the post, but the preserved comments demonstrate the instant enthusiasm for the soon-to-be Doge meme dog.
Kabosu Doge meme spread and evolution
In the following months, images of Shiba Inu dogs covered in colorful comic sans font words proliferated across early social media platforms. Single-topic blogs popped up on Tumblr and other platforms to devote themselves to the meme, and soon other dog breeds began to enter the mix, as well as photos of humans with faces similar to the original.
Later, the doge meme would spawn spinoff memes including the Cheems and Swole Doge dichotomy, as well as a variation of Wew Lad.
The meme became so popular that on December 6, 2013, the Doge meme dog would become its own cryptocurrency. Dogecoin started out as a joke, but it caught on thanks to the canine’s celebrity status and the rise of Bitcoin, eventually inspiring additional “meme coins” and reaching a value of over $85 billion at its peak market capitalization on May 5, 2021.
Doge meme examples
More doge memes:
- Internet bids sad farewell to Frisbee Doge, a meme among canines
- Did Elon Musk change the Twitter logo to distract from his Dogecoin lawsuit?
- The internet mourns Cheems, a Shiba Inu who became a meme
- The very longevity of Doge, the Shiba Inu meme that is still such popular
