Pug

How to spell pug

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pug

What does pug mean?

1. nounA small breed of dog with a short muzzle, wrinkled face, and tightly curled tail.

Pug in a sentence

• The pug snored loudly on the sofa all afternoon.

• Her pug wheezed after a short walk because of its flat nose.

Where does pug come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

The origin of pug is genuinely murky, which is why dictionaries label it 'of uncertain origin'. In the late 1500s and 1600s it began life as an affectionate term, used to address a person or an animal one was fond of, much like 'poppet' or 'dear', and it may be connected to the same family of pet names that gave us 'puck' and Low German and Dutch endearments. From a general pet word it narrowed to mean a small monkey kept as a household pet, and by the mid 1700s English speakers were applying it to the small, flat-faced, curly-tailed dog that had been brought over from the Low Countries and the Orient. Because the spelling is so short and the sound so plain, the trail back to any single ancestor word has been lost, so the safest account is simply that an old term of endearment hardened into the breed name we use today.

How the word is built

• pug (a single short root word with no prefix or suffix)