Hound

How to spell hound

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hound

What does hound mean?

1. nounA dog of a type bred and used for hunting, especially one that tracks by scent.
2. verbTo pursue or harass someone persistently and aggressively.

Hound in a sentence

• noun

  The hound picked up the fox's scent at the edge of the field.

• verb

  Reporters tend to hound celebrities for an exclusive quote.

• noun

  Every morning the old hound slept by the warm hearth.

• verb

  Debt collectors continued to hound him over a bill he had already paid.

Where does hound come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes straight from the Old English hund, which simply meant 'dog' in the general sense. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close relatives in Dutch hond and German Hund, all tracing back to a common ancestor for 'dog'. Scholars link that ancestor further back to a Proto-Indo-European root that also gave Latin canis and Greek kuon, the sources of words such as 'canine' and 'cynic'. Over the centuries the everyday English word for the animal shifted to 'dog', and 'hound' narrowed to mean specifically a hunting dog, especially one that tracks prey by scent. The verb sense, meaning to pursue or harass someone relentlessly, grew naturally from the image of a pack of hounds chasing down quarry. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable, the only quiet trap being the 'ou' that represents the modern vowel where the old form had a plain 'u'.

How the word is built

• hound (single root, from Old English hund meaning 'dog'); no prefix or suffix