In Internet culture, an image macro is a picture captioned with superimposed text for humorous effect.

Internet forums

On Internet forums and imageboards, image macros are used to emphasize a certain phrase (often an Internet meme

Internet meme

The term Internet meme is used to describe a concept that spreads via the Internet. The term is a reference to the concept of memes, although the latter concept refers to a much broader category of cultural information.-Description:...

) by superimposing it over a related picture.

Formats

Although they come in many forms, the most common type of image macro is a photograph with large text superimposed in Impact

Impact (typeface)

Impact is a realist sans-serif typeface designed by Geoffrey Lee in 1965 and released by the Stephenson Blake foundry. Its ultra-thick strokes, compressed letterspacing, and minimal interior counterform are specifically aimed, as its name suggests, to "impact". Impact has a high x-height, reaching...

 font, using all upper case letters and coloured white with a thin black outline. Exaggerated, intentional spelling errors are also used frequently for humorous effect.

One of the more famous image macros is "O RLY?

O RLY?

O RLY? is an Internet phenomenon, typically presented as an image macro featuring a Snowy Owl. The phrase "O RLY?", an abbreviated form of "Oh, really?", is popularly used in Internet forums in a sarcastic manner, often in response to an obvious, predictable, or blatantly false statement...

" O RLY is often used on the internet as an abbreviation for the phrase "Oh, really?" Originally started with a snowy owl

Snowy Owl

The Snowy Owl is a large owl of the typical owl family Strigidae. The Snowy Owl was first classified in 1758 by Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist who developed binomial nomenclature to classify and organize plants and animals. The bird is also known in North America as the Arctic Owl, Great...

 photograph (which is the classic O RLY image macro), it spread out over the Web quickly and was followed by other macros that convey a wide range of emotions. Another style of image macro that has amassed its own separate subculture is the "lolcat

Lolcat

A lolcat is an image combining a photograph of a cat with text intended to contribute humour. The text is often idiosyncratic and grammatically incorrect, and its use in this way is known as "lolspeak" or "kitty pidgin"....

", a photo of a cat with a humorous and ridiculously misspelled caption.

Etymology

The term "image macro" was first used on the Something Awful forums. The name derived from the fact that the 'macros' were a short bit of text a user could enter that the forum software would automatically parse and expand into the code for a pre-defined image, relating to the computer science topic of a macro, defined as "a rule or pattern that specifies how a certain input sequence (often a sequence of characters) should be mapped to an output sequence (also often a sequence of characters) according to a defined procedure."

External links

• Meme Generator image macro creator