Dogs

How to spell dogs

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dogs

What does dogs mean?

1. nounMore than one domesticated canine animal.
2. verbFollows or troubles someone persistently, as a problem or pursuer might.

Dogs in a sentence

• noun

  The neighbours keep three large dogs in the back garden.

• verb

  Bad luck dogs him through every job interview that month.

• noun

  Both dogs need a walk before breakfast every morning.

• verb

  Controversy still dogs the politician years after the scandal.

Where does dogs come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word descends from the Old English docga, a curiously rare term that sat alongside the far more common hund (the ancestor of 'hound'). For reasons that remain genuinely murky, docga gradually pushed hund aside to become the general English name for the animal, and scholars still cannot fully explain where docga itself came from, which is unusual for so everyday a word. By the late medieval period 'dog' was the ordinary term, and adding the regular plural ending -s gave 'dogs', following the same pattern as cats and birds. The same -s also forms the third-person verb, since 'dog' developed a figurative sense of trailing someone as a hound trails its quarry. The spelling is phonetically transparent, so the only thing to remember is that the plural is a plain -s with no doubling of the g.

How the word is built

• dog (Old English docga)
• -s (plural / third-person singular marker)