Watchdog

How to spell watchdog

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce watchdog

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does watchdog mean?

1. nounA person or organisation that monitors others to guard against wrongdoing, abuse, or inefficiency.
2. nounA dog kept to guard property and bark a warning at intruders.

Watchdog in a sentence

• The consumer watchdog fined the bank for misleading adverts.

• They kept a fierce watchdog chained near the warehouse gate.

• An industry watchdog published a report on unsafe working conditions.

• The farmer relied on his watchdog to scare off foxes at night.

Where does watchdog come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Watchdog is a transparent compound of two ancient native English words. 'Watch' descends from the Old English waeccan, meaning 'to be awake' or 'to keep guard', which is closely tied to 'wake'; a person on the night shift was literally one who stayed awake to keep watch. 'Dog' comes from the Old English docga, a word whose deeper origin is genuinely obscure but which has been the ordinary English term for the animal for over a thousand years. Joined together from the 1600s, the compound first named a literal dog kept to guard a house or property and bark at intruders. By the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries the sense extended naturally to a person or organisation that keeps a vigilant eye on others, especially one that monitors companies or governments for wrongdoing. The spelling holds no real trap because both halves are familiar everyday words simply written as one.

How the word is built

• watch (to guard, observe)
• dog (animal)