Sadge is an emote used to express sadness, disappointment mixed with a bit of cringe.
When Twitch was really blowing up during the pandemic in 2020 a lot of emotes really become common place outside of the streaming platform. One of those emotes which you can encounter in almost any stream is sadge.
Sadge only came on to the scene in 2020 but was adopted rapidly by the Twitch community.
But, what does Sadge meaning and where did it come from? Considering how many emotes there are when is the right time to use it properly?
Let’s dive in.
What is the Sadge emote?
Sadge is a mix of Pepega and FeelsBadMan and shows a distorted Pepe The Frog, looking downwards with a sad face.
It is usually accompanied with the words Sadge afterwards.
What does the Sadge emote mean?
Sadge is an emote to express pathetic sadness or sadness mixed with a bit of cringe. Sadge is a good emote when someone has failed miserably in an almost embarrassing way. Sadge would not be appropriate when describing something genuinely sad as FeelsBadMan would be a better choice. Sadge is similar to Madge, which is an emote to convey anger…with cringe.
However, as is the case with other emotes on Twitch, Sadge can and will be used in any scenario deliberately or ironically.
What does the word Sadge mean?
There are plenty of theories around why it’s called ‘sadge’. Our personal opinion is that it is just a mix if sad and pepega, which would make sadga which would then become a word which sounds better: sadge.
Others have suggested it is a mixture of sad and cringe which would make sense considering its meaning is literally that.
An off the wall suggestion is that it is a mixture of sad and gay. We think this is totally bonkers but we thoughts we’d include it anyway.

A bizarrely thorough study was undertaken which found Sadge to be relevant to a few emotions and pepe illustrations. Here’s a summary.

Sadge origins
As previously mentioned, the Sadge emote is relatively new and the interest was near zero before 2020.
Clearly, it is a part of the Pepe The Frog webcomic designs and the MonkaS series of emotes.
Here’s the Google Trend for the phrase.

The original Sadge emote was uploaded to Better Twitch TV on January the 3rd, 2020 by user Redshell. Redshell is a serial emote maker and has a track history of getting them into the mainstream. This doesn’t mean that Redshell created it, though.
Sadge got into the mainstream through copy pasta on Forsen’s chat, with messages like the below.

What does Sadge mean in text?
Sadge and many other emotes are now so famous that the image doesn’t even need to be shown, people will just type Sadge. When it is used in text it is referring to these emote which can mean sadness with a twinge of cringe.