I Can Has Cheezburger and the Invention of LOLspeak

By January 2008, one website was receiving roughly 8,000 captioned cat pictures a day and publishing about a dozen of them. That ratio is the whole story of LOLspeak, the deliberately broken English that ran under lolcat photographs for most of a decade. It looks like typing errors. It is not. It was a written variety with consistent spelling conventions, a recognisable verb system and phrase templates that could be used correctly or incorrectly, and the thing that made it consistent was a filter: I Can Has Cheezburger accepted a fraction of one percent of what people sent it, and everybody who wanted to get published learned to write like the stuff that got published.

Table of Contents

• Before Cheezburger, the Cats Had No Publisher
• January 11, 2007: The Day the Joke Got an Editor
• The Rules of LOLspeak, Reverse Engineered
• Linguists Checked, and LOLspeak Held Up
• Older Ancestors and Foreign Cousins
• LOLCODE: When the Dialect Became a Programming Language
• Why LOLspeak Died and DoggoLingo Won
• Frequently Asked Questions

Before Cheezburger, the Cats Had No Publisher

Captioned cat pictures existed for years before anyone monetised them. They circulated on 4chan, where Saturday had become the day for posting cats, and on the Something Awful forums, and they vanished as fast as they appeared because imageboards delete almost everything they touch. We covered the origin of that site in our piece on how 4chan was built in eight days by a 15-year-old, and the mythology that grew out of the Caturday ritual in our piece on Ceiling Cat, Basement Cat and the imageboard religion of lolcats. The visual grammar, white Impact type with a black outline, came from a wider tradition we broke down in our guide to the image macro.

What none of that had was persistence. A joke posted to an anonymous board on Saturday was gone by Sunday. A written style can spread under those conditions, but it cannot standardise, because there is no archive to compare yourself against and no authority deciding which version was good. Standardisation needs an institution: a printing house, a dictionary, a state academy. Cat pictures got a blog.

January 11, 2007: The Day the Joke Got an Editor

On January 11, 2007, Eric Nakagawa, a blogger in Hawaii, posted one image to a new website he had set up with Kari Unebasami. The picture was a grinning British Shorthair that had been circulating on the Something Awful forums. The caption read “I Can Has Cheezburger?” and the site took its name from the caption.

The growth was immediate. By May 2007 the site was taking up to 1.5 million hits a day, and by 2008 roughly two million page views daily. In September 2007 an investor group led by Ben Huh bought it in a deal reported by Time at around two million dollars. Huh turned the single blog into a network that eventually included FAIL Blog and Know Your Meme, raised a 30 million dollar round in January 2011 from Madrona Venture Group and Foundry Group, and sold the company to Literally Media in 2016. Bravo even made a reality series about the office, called LOLwork.

The LOL Builder and 8,000 Submissions a Day

The mechanism that mattered was not the money. It was a tool called the LOL Builder, which let any reader upload a photograph, type a caption in Impact and submit it. In July 2007 the site was getting as many as 500 submissions a day. By January 2008 the average was around 8,000. Only about a dozen a day were published. Readers also rated images on a scale of one to five cheezburgers, and posting was timed to catch morning, lunchtime and evening traffic.

Run that loop for two years and you have built a language academy by accident. Thousands of people write daily, a tiny selection is published, everyone reads the published set, and the next day’s submissions imitate what got through. Nobody ever wrote a style guide. The acceptance rate wrote it for them. That is the difference between a spelling joke and a variety with norms, and it is why LOLspeak of 2009 is noticeably more regular than the scattered captions of 2005.

The Rules of LOLspeak, Reverse Engineered

The first person to argue in public that LOLspeak had a grammar was the blogger Anil Dash, in a post called “Cats Can Has Grammar” on April 23, 2007, roughly three months after Cheezburger launched. His argument was elegant and hard to refute: you can do it wrong. He pointed at a caption reading “I are dunecat. I controls the spice” and noted that it simply was not right, in a way that any regular reader could feel but nobody had explained. A system where competent users agree that a given output is malformed is a system with rules. Dash called it a kitty pidgin, and the label stuck for years.

Spelling Was Phonetic, Not Random

The respellings follow sound, not chaos. “Hi” becomes “hai”, “bye” becomes “bai”, “my” becomes “mai”. The same diphthong gets the same treatment every time, which is the definition of an orthographic convention. “Cheeseburger” loses its silent letters and picks up a z for the voiced consonant it actually contains, giving “cheezburger”. Plurals and verb endings that sound voiced get spelled with z rather than s. This is the same principle behind eye dialect in printed fiction, where a writer respells standard pronunciations to signal that the speaker is not standard.

The Verbs Did Something English Verbs Cannot

“I can has” is the signature, and it is a specific violation rather than a general one. English modals take the bare infinitive, so “can have” is required and “can has” is impossible. LOLspeak inflects the verb after the modal anyway. Elsewhere it does the opposite and strips agreement where English demands it. Past tenses get doubled, so a verb already marked for past gets marked again. The copula, the verb “to be”, gets dropped in some positions and over-applied in others. None of this is random damage. It is a consistent set of substitutions applied to a small number of grammatical slots, which is why fluent users could produce new sentences that other users immediately recognised as correct.

Templates Did the Rest

The most productive structure was a fill-in frame borrowed from online gaming trash talk: “I’m in ur X, Ving ur Y.” The frame carried the joke and the writer supplied two nouns and a verb. Other recurring forms include “Oh hai”, the sign-off “kthxbai”, “Do Not Want”, “Monorail Cat” and “Oh Noes”. A reader who knew ten templates could caption almost any photograph, which is exactly the property that makes a format spread. The stretched-cat lineage we traced in the history of Longcat worked the same way, one shape reused until it became a character.

Linguists Checked, and LOLspeak Held Up

In 2011 Jordan Lefler submitted a master’s thesis at Louisiana State University titled “I can has thesis? A linguistic analysis of lolspeak”, supervised by Mary J. Brody. Lefler treated lolspeak as an internet dialect of English used together with images of cats, and built a multi-modal transcription method, grounded in Grounded Theory, that recorded the caption and the photograph together rather than pulling the text out on its own. The data came from I Can Has Cheezburger itself. The analysis worked through parts of speech, consonants and vowels, the copula and the determiner system, and documented the hi/bye/my to hai/bai/mai correspondence as a rule rather than an accident.

Lefler’s conclusion is the useful correction to Dash. LOLspeak is language play: invented, whimsical, deliberate. That distinction matters, because a real pidgin arises out of necessity when two groups with no shared language have to trade, and nobody needed LOLspeak to buy anything. It was performed incompetence by people who were entirely competent in English, which is a different linguistic object and arguably a more interesting one.

The same year, Lauren Gawne and Jill Vaughan presented “I can haz language play: The construction of language and identity in LOLspeak” at the 42nd Australian Linguistic Society conference in Canberra, held from 1 to 4 December 2011. Their finding was that the norms were collaboratively constructed and that fluent users could subvert them on purpose for effect, which only works if the norms exist in the first place. Writing good LOLspeak was a membership test. The word “lolcat” itself was a runner-up in the American Dialect Society’s Most Creative category for 2007, losing to “Googlegänger”.

Older Ancestors and Foreign Cousins

Treating a cat as the speaker of a deformed English was not invented in 2007, and the internet did not invent written dialects built for fun.

Krazy Kat Did Eye Dialect for Thirty Years

George Herriman drew Krazy Kat from 1913 to 1944, and gave the cat a speech register assembled out of the New Orleans dialect Herriman grew up with, plus French, Spanish, Yiddish and African American slang, all rendered in aggressive phonetic spelling. Krazy sighs “li’l ainjil” for “little angel” and “li’l dahlink” for “little darling”. Herriman also differentiated his characters by register, giving Officer Pupp a bombastic, alliterative delivery that no reader would confuse with Krazy’s. That is a comic strip doing what lolcats did ninety years later: a cat speaks, and the deformation of the spelling is the character.

Russia Built Its Own Version, and a President Joked About Teaching It

The Russian-speaking internet developed a parallel written variety with no cats in it at all. Padonkaffsky jargon, also called Olbanian, came out of a Runet subculture that called itself the padonki. Its defining feature is deliberate misspelling applied systematically, modelled on the phonetic realities that standard Russian orthography hides: unstressed vowels reduce, consonants devoice at the end of words, so “avtor” (author) is written “afftar” and “oshibka” (error) becomes “ashibka”. The most famous single item is “preved”, a respelling of the greeting “privet”. It went mainstream far beyond its origins, and Dmitry Medvedev, then president of Russia, joked publicly that Olbanian should be taught in schools.

The structural parallel with LOLspeak is exact. Both are phonetically motivated respellings of a standard orthography, both are produced by people who can spell perfectly well, and what reads as an error to an outsider is exactly what works as a badge to an insider.

LOLCODE: When the Dialect Became a Programming Language

The clearest evidence that LOLspeak had become a system rather than a joke is that somebody compiled it. In May 2007, four months after Cheezburger launched, Adam T. Lindsay of the Computing Department at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom released LOLCODE, an esoteric programming language built entirely out of lolcat vocabulary. A program opens with HAI and a version number and closes with KTHXBYE. Output is VISIBLE, input is GIMMEH. Version 1.2 of the specification came out in July 2007, and working interpreters and compilers exist.

You cannot build a programming language out of a vocabulary with no agreed forms. Every LOLCODE keyword is a LOLspeak item Lindsay could assume his readers recognised without a gloss, four months into the life of the site that standardised them.

Why LOLspeak Died and DoggoLingo Won

LOLspeak also went to print. Gotham Books published “I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun” in 2008, credited to Professor Happycat, collecting around 200 images with a guide to the finer points of the dialect. It reached the New York Times bestseller list in January 2009, and a second book, “How To Take Over The Wurld: An LOLcat Guide 2 Winning”, followed the same year. Peak commercial LOLspeak and peak actual LOLspeak arrived at roughly the same moment, which is usually a bad sign for a subculture.

The successor dialect shows why. The linguist Gretchen McCulloch, whose book “Because Internet” came out in 2019 and grew from a 2014 article analysing the doge meme, drew the key distinction between LOLspeak and DoggoLingo. In lolcats, the animal talks. The caption is the cat’s voice, so the writer has to perform a character. In DoggoLingo, humans talk. Words like doggo, pupper, woofer, pupperino and fluffer, and onomatopoeia like bork, blep and mlem, are how people already address their pets out loud, carried into text. That makes DoggoLingo far easier to use, because you are not impersonating anyone, and it is why bits of it escaped into spoken English while almost nothing from LOLspeak did.

The other factor is platform. Cheezburger’s filter created the standard and also owned it. When traffic moved to Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit and eventually TikTok, there was no single gatekeeper publishing a dozen approved examples a day, so the next wave of animal language never converged the way LOLspeak did. The doge meme and its “such wow” phrasing arrived through a completely different route, and the arc from there to the present is laid out in our full timeline of cat memes and in the wider history of internet memes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is LOLspeak actually a language?

Not in the sense that anyone grew up speaking it. Linguists who studied it, including Jordan Lefler in 2011, classify it as language play: an invented written variety with consistent rules, produced deliberately by people fully competent in standard English. It has conventions and users can violate them, which is more structure than most internet slang ever acquires.

Who invented “I can has cheezburger”?

The caption was already circulating on the Something Awful forums before the website existed. Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami launched the site around that image on January 11, 2007. The original photographer of the grinning British Shorthair has never been definitively established.

Why is it “cheezburger” and not “cheeseburger”?

Because the respelling follows pronunciation. The s in “cheese” is pronounced as a voiced z, and the silent e carries no sound, so both get corrected to match speech. The same logic explains hai, bai and mai. It is phonetic transcription played for laughs, not a typing error.

Did other languages have their own LOLspeak?

The closest parallel is Padonkaffsky jargon, or Olbanian, on the Russian-speaking internet. It applies systematic phonetic misspelling to standard Russian, producing forms like “afftar” for “avtor” and the famous greeting “preved” for “privet”. It grew from a message board subculture rather than from cat photographs, but the mechanism and the in-group function are the same.

Does anyone still write in LOLspeak?

Rarely, and usually as a period reference rather than live usage. The dialect is dated in a specific way, roughly 2007 to 2012, which makes it useful as shorthand for that era of the web. LOLCODE interpreters still run, but the daily production that kept the standard alive stopped when the site that filtered it stopped mattering.

The Cat Had a Grammar All Along

LOLspeak is worth remembering for one reason that has nothing to do with cats. It is a rare, fully documented case of a written variety forming in public, in about eighteen months, with the standardising institution visible in plain sight: a submission form, an acceptance rate well under one percent, and a dozen published examples a day that everyone copied. Language academies usually take centuries and a government. This one took a blog in Hawaii, a British Shorthair with an unexplained grin, and a great many people trying to get published.

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