'Lolcat' -- How Do Cats Communicate?

A Lolcat is a picture of a cat with text intended to contribute humor. Lolcat is a made-up language that is said to be spoken by fluffy animals such as pets.

The text is often idiosyncratic and grammatically incorrect, and its use in this way is known as lolspeak or kitty pidgin. Lolcat is a compound word of the acronymic abbreviation LOL and the word cat.

Lol stands for Laugh out Loud or Laughing out Loud, hence lolcats are intended to be funny and include jokes. The lolcats images usually consist of a photo of a cat with a large caption characteristically set in a sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black.

A synonym for Lolcat is cat macro, since the images are a type of image macro. Lolcats are commonly designed for photo sharing imageboards and other Internet forums. Similar image macros which do not actually feature cats are often simply referred to as lols.

As early as the 1870s, British portrait photographer Harry Pointer created a carte de visite series featuring felines posing in various situations, to which he added amusing text intended to further enhance their appeal, according to Sussex PhotoHistory.

The word Lolcat is attested as early as June 2006, and the domain name LOLcats.com was registered on June 14, 2006. The News Journal states that some trace the lolcats back to the site 4chan, which features bizarre cat pictures on Saturdays, or Caturdays.

Take a glimpse of Lolcat, the way cats communicate.