Huskies

How to spell huskies

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce huskies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does huskies mean?

1. nounStrong, thick-coated working dogs of the Arctic, traditionally used in teams to pull sleds.

Huskies in a sentence

• A team of six huskies pulled the loaded sled across the frozen lake.

• The rescue station kept several huskies for travelling over deep snow.

Where does huskies come from?

Language of origin: Other

This is the plural of 'husky', the powerful sled dog of the Arctic. The name has nothing to do with the 'husky' that means hoarse or burly; instead it arose in the early 1800s among English speakers in Canada as a clipped, casual form of 'Eskimo', sometimes written 'Huskemaw' or 'Husky', referring first to the Arctic peoples and then to their working dogs. Over time the word narrowed to the breed itself, and the modern Siberian Husky took the name in the twentieth century. Because the singular ends in a consonant followed by 'y', the plural follows the regular English rule of swapping 'y' for 'ies', which is the only real spelling decision the writer has to make. The shared spelling with the unrelated adjective 'husky' (meaning deep-voiced or sturdy) is a coincidence of clipping, not a common root.

How the word is built

• husk (from earlier 'Husky', a contraction of 'Eskimo')
• -y (forming the dog name)
• -es (plural with y changing to i)