A Lolcat is an image combining a photograph of an animal, most frequently a cat, with a subjectively humorous and idiosyncratic caption in broken English referred to as Kitty Pidgin , or lolspeak. The idea originated on 4chan imageboards as Caturday. "Lolcats' demented captions create a new Web language", Tamara Ikenberg, The News Journal, 9 July 2007 The name "lolcat" is a compound word of "lol" and "cat". The phenomenon is also referred to as cat macros. Lolcats are created for photo sharing imageboards and other internet forums. Lolcats are similar to other anthropomorphic animal-based image macros such as the O RLY? owl.

The term lolcat gained national media attention in the United States when it was covered by Time magazine, Partial scan of the print edition: http://fcrunk.wellimean.com/memes/catstime.jpg 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]." The superimposed text is assumed to be uttered by the cat in the photograph. There are parallels between the language used in lolcats and baby talk, which owners of cats often use when talking to them.