Woof

How to spell woof

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce woof

What does woof mean?

1. interjectionThe deep, low barking sound made by a dog, often written to imitate it.

Woof in a sentence

• The dog gave a single woof when the doorbell rang.

• A low woof from the kennel warned us the guard dog was awake.

Where does woof come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Woof carries two quite separate stories under one spelling. The older sense, the crosswise threads in weaving, comes from Old English owef or awef, formed from the prefix a- or on- joined to wefan, the verb meaning 'to weave'; it literally named the threads that are woven across the lengthwise warp. Over the centuries the initial vowel was reshaped under the influence of 'warp' and 'weave', leaving the familiar 'woof'. The far more common modern sense, the deep bark of a dog, is much younger and purely imitative: it was coined to mimic the low sound a large dog makes, recorded from around the seventeenth century onward. Because the weaving word is Germanic and native to English while the barking word is an echo of an actual noise, the shared spelling is a coincidence of sound rather than a true family link. The weaving sense is closely related to 'weft', its commoner synonym, which sits beside it in any description of how cloth is made.

How the word is built

• woof (a single root word; the animal-noise sense is imitative, the weaving sense descends from Old English wefan 'to weave'; no prefix or suffix)