Etymology and Usage
The term "image macro" originated from websites like the Something Awful forums and possibly other Internet sites. 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."
Beginning in 2007, lolcats and similar image macros (a form of Internet phenomena) spread beyond the initial communities who created them and became widely popular.
Read more about this topic: Image Macro
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