Underdog

How to spell underdog

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce underdog

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does underdog mean?

1. nounA person or team expected to lose a contest or struggle, especially against a stronger opponent.

Underdog in a sentence

• The local club went into the final as the clear underdog.

• Crowds tend to cheer for the underdog in a tense match.

Where does underdog come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, joining the everyday preposition 'under', meaning beneath or in a lower position, with 'dog', the familiar Germanic word for the animal. It appears to have emerged in the second half of the 1800s, with American sources from around the 1880s, and the most widely repeated explanation links it to dog fighting: the beaten animal pinned beneath its rival was the 'underdog', while the winner standing over it was the 'overdog' or 'top dog'. From that grim literal picture the word quickly took on its modern figurative sense of any contestant, competitor, or party expected to lose. Because it is a plain compound of two common words, the spelling holds no real surprises; the only thing to remember is that it is written solid, as one word, with no hyphen and no space.

How the word is built

• under- (beneath, lower)
• dog (the animal, here the loser in a fight)