The original meme featured Kabosu, a female Shiba Inu dog. The famous picture of her first appeared in a 2010 blog post by her owner Atsuko Sato, and variations of the pictures using overlaid Comic Sans text were posted afterward from a Tumblr blog, Shiba Confessions. However, the use of the intentionally misspelled word "Doge" dates back to June 2005, when it was mentioned in an episode of Homestar Runner's puppet series. The use of the word began to grow in popularity after it was used on Reddit in October 2010 in a post of a corgi titled "LMBO LOOK @ THIS FUKKEN DOGE."

Another Shiba Inu featured in the meme is Suki, a female belonging to photographer Jonathan Fleming from San Francisco. His wife had accidentally put a scarf in the wash, making it shrink. He took a photograph of Suki wearing the scarf outside on a cold night in February 2010.

Some of the other characters used in the meme are based on photographs of real dogs. Cheems is based on an image of a dog named Balltze, from Hong Kong; he was adopted at the age of one and was nine years old in 2020. He had leukemia and was undergoing thoracentesis (the draining of fluid from his chest) when he died on August 18, 2023, aged 12. Walter is based on the bull terrier Nelson, who originally became popular in 2018 after his owner, Victoria Leigh, posted a picture of Nelson to Twitter, with the caption "When u open the front-facing camera on accident." In 2020, rumors of Nelson's death began to circulate the internet, although they turned out to be false.

The most common pronunciations of "Doge" are /ˈdoʊdʒ/ DOHJ and /ˈdoʊɡ/ DOHG. In non-English-speaking countries, "Doge" is occasionally pronounced /ˈdɒdʒ/ "dodge". Those unfamiliar or unacquainted with the meme also use the pronunciations /ˈdɒɡi/ "doggie", /ˈdɒɡeɪ/ DOG-ay, /ˈdoʊɡeɪ/ DOH-gay, or simply like the word "dog" itself, i.e. /ˈdɒɡ/ DOG or /ˈdɔːɡ/ DAWG.

In Poland the meme is known as "pieseł" ([piɛsɛw]), derived from the Polish word "pies", which means dog in English.

Online searches for the meme began to increase in July 2013. In August 2013, images of the meme were spammed on Reddit's r/MURICA subreddit by 4chan's random imageboard, /b/. In late December 2013, members of the U.S. Congress produced material in the meme's style. The Huffington Post commented that Doge was "killed" because of the Congress members' usage of the meme. In December 2013, the Dogecoin was introduced as a new cryptocurrency, making it the first cryptocurrency to be based on an Internet meme; the viral phenomenon, along with usage of the Comic Sans MS typeface, gave it "the Internet density of a large star" according to Medium writer Quinn Norton.
By early 2014, Doge's popularity was sustained by Internet communities on social media, accompanied by the rapid growth and acceptance of Dogecoin. In April 2014, Doge experienced a second major media resurgence due to revelations of the Dogecoin community's intent to sponsor Josh Wise in NASCAR and place a picture of the Shiba Inu on his vehicle. The car features in downloadable content for the video game NASCAR '14. Media outlets have embraced the meme while reporting on the cryptocurrency and the car, with titles featuring phrases such as "so wow" and "very vroom". A report on The Daily Dot in December 2016 found that Doge's popularity peaked in 2014 and then fell due to "overexposure and co-option by advertisers and mainstream 'normies'", but remained stable since then and returned to Tumblr's top 10 shared memes of the year in 2016. For April Fools' Day in 2017, China Central Television published a hoax story of the death of Kabosu. In 2021, a non-fungible token depicting the meme was acquired by PleasrDAO for $4 million. In 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an online phenomenon and group dedicated to countering Russian propaganda and Russian disinformation called NAFO (or the North Atlantic Fella Organization), where participants, who refer themselves as "Fellas", use Doge as their avatar. In addition to posting pro-Ukraine memes, or ones mocking Russian war effort and strategy and "shitposting", the group also raises funds for the Ukrainian military and other pro-Ukrainian causes.

Kabosu died of leukemia on 24 May 2024 at the age of 18. Her owner, Atsuko Sato, announced the news on her social media, stating that Kabosu died peacefully while being caressed. Sato shared a heartfelt message, expressing her gratitude for the time she had with Kabosu and the joy she brought to people's lives through the "Doge" meme.

Convergence viewed the use of the image in commercial advertising as a result of it being a widely recognized cultural icon. In mid-2014, the advertisement agency DDB Stockholm had Doge featured prominently in an advertising campaign for the public transport company SL in Stockholm, Sweden. The advertisement concerned the company's special summer tickets, and featured Doge holding a public transport ticket in his mouth, with phrases such as "many summer", "such cheap" and "very buy".
Google created a Doge Easter egg: when doge meme was entered into the YouTube search bar, all the site's text would be displayed in colorful Comic Sans, similar to the kind used by the meme. In January 2014, Sydney-based web developers Katia Eirin and Bennett Wong created Doge Weather, a weather website and mobile app incorporating the meme. Doge Weather reports the temperature and weather conditions based on the user's geographic location. In April 2014, Doge Weather became available as a mobile app for iOS 7. Mozilla's Servo project incorporated the meme into the project logo between May 2016 and February 2020.

Between April 3 and 7, 2023, Elon Musk replaced Twitter's bird logo with an image of Doge for website users. Some speculated that it may have been a late-posted April Fools' Day joke; however, Thomas Barabbi of New York Post said that the Dogecoin logo appeared just days after Musk's lawyers asked a judge to dismiss a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit, accusing the billionaire of boosting the digital currency's value.
In the video for "Weird Al" Yankovic's 2014 song "Word Crimes", a song about bad grammar, a Doge tweet is used to illustrate the types of bad grammar referenced in that part of the song. In the 2015 video game The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes, a reference to the meme can be found in the North American version only. When examining one of the ancient bookshelves, the text reads "Still, coming here has at least afforded me the rare chance to explore these ancient ruins. So ancient. Such ruin." The reference was met with mixed views from fans of the series. In the 2015 online game Agar.io, Doge appears as a playable skin in the game by typing in the name "Doge". Just Cause 3 also included a special mode that popped up text in the style of the meme in response to certain player actions. In 2017, the video game Smite added a Doge skin for the goddess Skadi.