mlem

My First Shiba Inu

The internet slang of DoggoLingo celebrates dogs, cats, and other adorable animals we post about online, using linguistic features like cutesy misspellings and irresistible onomatopoeia, usually accompanied by an adorable photo of a fluffer. A dog is called a doggo, for instance; a plump doggo is considered chonky while a little one, smol.

The sound a dog (or other animal, such as a cat) makes when its tongue darts out to lick its nose or chops is called a mlem, in onomatopoeic imitation of the action. It’s closely related to another DoggoLingo term, blep, which is when the animal’s tongue peaks out of its mouth for an extended period of time. (More lax DoggoLinguists might use blep and mlem interchangeably.)

Joshua Labajo

Evidence for mlem appears as early as February 2015, when a video of a cat repeatedly lapping water was posted to Imgur and Reddit captioned with mlem.

As for the poster’s choice of mlem, some commenters imagine Yoshi’s licking sound effect in the Super Mario Bros video games. Indeed, many people have since posted videos of animals mlem‘ing, scored with Yoshi’s signature sound.