Other forms: dogs, dogged
A dog is the four-legged animal kept as a pet, which barks and needs walking. Walk the dog, a stray dog, our dog.
Strictly, a dog is the male and a bitch the female, though dog covers both in ordinary use. Puppy is the young one. The idioms are countless: a dog's life, let sleeping dogs lie, dog eat dog, going to the dogs, the dog days of summer, and it is raining cats and dogs. Note dog-eared, dogged meaning persistent, and that a dog whistle in politics is a message only one group is meant to hear.
1noundogA four-legged animal kept as a pet, which barks.~98%
“The dog barks at the postman and at nothing else.”
2verbfollowTo follow or trouble somebody persistently.~2%
“The same question dogged him for about twenty years.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 17 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
dog is an animal.
Also accepted in games: puppy
Old English docga was a rare word for a particular powerful breed, and the ordinary word for the animal was hund. Docga somehow displaced hund entirely, which is unusual, and nobody knows where docga itself came from.
Middle English
dogge
English, today
dog
Built from
From Middle English dogge. Middle English dogge (akin to Scots dug), from Old English dogga, docga, of unknown origin. The original meaning seems to have been a common dog, as opposed to a well-bred one, or something like 'cur', and perhaps later came to be used for stocky dogs. Possibly a pet-form diminutive with suffix -ga (compare frocga (“frog”), picga (“pig”)), appended to a base dog-, doc- of unclear origin and meaning. One possibility is Old English dox (“dark, swarthy”) (compare frocga from frox). Another proposal is that it derives from Proto-West Germanic dugan (“to be suitable”), the origin of Old English dugan (“to be good, worthy, useful”), English dow, Dutch deugen, German taugen. The theory goes that it could have been an epithet for dogs, commonly used by children, meaning "good/useful animal". Another one is that it is related to docce (“stock, muscle”), from dokkā (“round mass, ball, muscle, doll”), whence dock (“stumpy tail”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA