A lolcat is an image combining a photograph, most frequently of a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in (often) broken English—a dialect which is known as "lolspeak" or "kitty pidgin" and which parodies the poor grammar typically attributed to Internet slang. The name "lolcat" is a compound word of the acronymic abbreviation "LOL" and the word "cat". A synonym for "lolcat" is cat macro, since the images are a type of image macro.

Lolcats are designed for photo sharing imageboards and other internet forums. The term lolcat gained national media attention in the United States when it was covered by Time, which wrote that non-commercialized phenomena of the sort are increasingly rare, stating that lolcats have "a distinctly old-school, early 1990s, Usenet feel to [them]". These 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.

The image is, on occasion, digitally edited for effect. The caption generally acts as a speech balloon encompassing a comment from the cat, or as a description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and syntax, featuring "strangely-conjugated verbs, but a tendency to converge to a new set of rules in spelling and grammar." The text parodies the grammar-poor patois stereotypically attributed to Internet slang.

Frequently, lolcat captions take the form of phrasal templates. Some phrases have a known source, usually a well-known Internet meme, such as All your base are belong to us or Do not want, while others don't. There are parallels between the language used in lolcats and baby talk, which some owners of cats often use when talking to them.

Similar to 0 things you like: