Doge

A doge (/ˈdoʊdʒ/;Italian pronunciation: [ˈdɔːdʒe], plural dogi or doges) was an elected, chief-of-state lordship, the ruler of the republic in many of the Italian city-states during the medieval and renaissance periods, in the Italian "crowned republics".

Etymology

The word is from the Venetian dialect, reaching English via French. Doge, along with the related English: duke and Italian: duce, descends from the Latin: dux, meaning "leader", especially in a military context. The wife of a doge is styled a dogaressa and the office of the doge is termed dogeship.

Usage

The title of doge was used for the elected chief of state in a number of Italian "crowned republics". The two best known such republics were Venice (where in Venetian he was called doxe [ˈdɔːze]) and Genoa (where he was called a duxe [dyːʒe]) which rivalled each other, and the other regional great powers, by building their historical city-states into maritime, commercial, and territorial mini-empires. Other Italian republics to have doges were Amalfi and the small town of Senarica.

Doge (disambiguation)

Doge may refer to:

Doge (meme)

Doge (often pronounced /ˈdoʊʒ/ DOHJ or /ˈdoʊɡ/ DOHG) is an Internet meme that became popular in 2013. The meme typically consists of a picture of a Shiba Inu accompanied by multicolored text in Comic Sans font in the foreground. The text, representing a kind of internal monologue, is deliberately written in a form of broken English.

The meme is based on a 2010 photograph, and became popular in late 2013, being named as Know Your Meme's "top meme" of that year. A cryptocurrency based on Doge, the Dogecoin, was launched in December 2013, and the Shiba Inu is featured on Josh Wise's NASCAR car due to a sponsorship deal. Doge has also been referenced by members of the United States Congress, a safety video for Delta Air Lines, a Google Easter egg, and the video for the song "Word Crimes" by "Weird Al" Yankovic.

Structure

Doge uses two-word phrases in which the first word is almost always one of five modifiers ("so", "such", "many", "much", and "very"), and the departure from correct English is to use the modifier with a word that it cannot properly modify. For example, "Much respect. So noble." uses the doge modifiers but is not "proper" doge because the modifiers are used in a formally correct fashion; the doge version would be "Much noble, so respect." In addition to these phrases, a doge utterance often ends with a single word, most often "wow" but with "amaze" and "excite" also being used.