Dane

How to spell dane

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dane

What does dane mean?

1. nounA native or citizen of Denmark.
2. nounA dog of the Great Dane breed, one of the very largest domestic dogs.

Dane in a sentence

• A dane living abroad still misses the countryside of Denmark in summer.

• The great dane towered over every other dog at the park.

• The visiting dane described the ferry crossing from Denmark to Sweden.

• Their family adopted a fawn-coloured great dane that weighed almost seventy kilograms.

Where does dane come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English Dene, the name for the Germanic people who settled in what is now Denmark and who raided and ruled parts of England during the Viking age. The form is closely tied to Danish itself, the language and nationality, and to the country name Denmark, which literally meant the borderland or march of the Danes. Through the medieval period the spelling settled into the single short form we use today, helped by the related Latin Dani and Old Norse Danir, all naming the same northern people. The dog breed known as the Great Dane carries the name through a piece of historical confusion, since the breed was developed largely in Germany rather than Denmark. A spelling trap worth noting is that dane sounds exactly like deign, the verb meaning to lower oneself to do something, so the silent letters in deign are what separate the two on the page.

How the word is built

• dane (from Old English Dene, the people of Denmark)