In a couple of our Old English readings, we’ve run across references to dogs. The OE word is hund, which isn’t any surprise — not only do we still have the word hound in Modern English, but the word hund has cognates in the other Germanic languages: Hund in German, hund in Swedish, hond in Dutch, and so on.
Thinking about hund/dog/hound has motivated me to look into all this and to investigate other names that we use for Canis familiaris.
In Modern English, our generic word is dog, not hound. The question of why we use the word dog is a long-standing etymological mystery; it’s considered one of those “origin unknown” words. In all of the known Old English sources, there’s only one instance of the word (docgena, “of the dogs”), and it appears in a late document.
It’s particularly odd because the term for domestic dogs is a common word, and as one scholar says, “We would normally expect a generic term for the domesticated dog to be diachronically stable.” In other words, it isn’t common for core words like hund to change to dog, at least without some strong external influence, like, oh, the imposition of a foreign language such as French. But the word dog didn’t come from French or Old Norse or, it seems, any other obvious source. It just appeared of its own in English.[1]
The aforementioned scholar, Piotr Gąsiorowski, has a theory. Through some phonological analysis and with reference to similarly structured words, he concludes that the original Old English term might have been dox hund — a “dusky” (i.e. dark) hound. And then the compound was shortened to just dox, which under some circumstances that he recounts could have become dog.[2]
The word dogge reappears in English a couple of hundred years later, initially in pejorative senses (“mad dog”, “lousy dog”). It looks like dogge then started being applied to large dogs like bulldogs and mastiffs and other dogs used for hunting and bear-baiting — hence our term dogged. In fact, this sense of dogge as a large dog was borrowed into other languages: “In the 16th century, the word dog was adopted by several continental European languages as their word for mastiff” (Wiktionary) or other large dogs, like Great Danes.
In the Middle English period (~1300), the words dog and hound sort of traded places. Dog became the generic term for domestic dogs, and hound started referring to dogs used for hunting. Obviously, we can still use hound generically, but in the worlds of breeds and pedigree, a hound is distinct from, say, a poodle or a terrier. And in the language community of dog breeding, a dog is a male dog, as distinct from a bitch, the word for a female dog.[3]
Update, 13 Feb 24: Hana Videen (author of the new book The Deor-Hord: An Old English Bestiary), has a post today about words in Old English for dog and cat. Excerpt:
The words for ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ are virtually the same in Old English [as in Modern English] – hund (from which we get ‘hound’) and cat or catte (pronounced COT-tuh). There’s also the word docga (pronounced DODGE-ah), more similar to our ‘dog’, but it appears only once in the entire corpus, compared to hund’s 300 occurrences. Cat also appears far less frequently in Old English than hund — only eight times, most of which are in glosses (translations of Latin words for language learners).
Unlike cats, dogs have a variety of terms in Old English: hwelp (‘young dog’ or ‘whelp’), bicce and tife (both meaning ‘female dog’ or ‘bitch’), wæl-hwelp (literally ‘slaughter-whelp’, a hunting dog or dog that kills), wede-hund (mad dog), as well as references to specific breeds, like heahdeor-hund (deerhound), grig-hund (greyhound), roþ-hund (mastiff, pronounced ROTH-HUND) and ræcc (setter). Hundas were useful aids in the work of both the sceap-hyrde (shepherd) and the hunta (hunter) …
So that’s all about dog. Thinking about dogs and hounds also got me thinking about the names of different breeds. I didn’t research these names exhaustively, but there are a few surprises among them. Herewith a list with Random and also Fun Facts about breed names.
Poodle. (First cite 1773 in English) From German Pudelhund. The verb pudeln in German means “to splash in water” (puddle, right?); poodles are water dogs. Fun Fact: the German expression pudelwohl (“poodle-well”) means something like “happy as a clam” (via Adam Sharp on Twitter).
Bulldog. (First cite 1528) A dog bred for the “sport” of bull-baiting, bleah.
Dachshund. (First cite 1882) In German, a Dachs is a badger. These short-legged and aggressive dogs were bred to go after badgers and other ground-dwelling critters via digging. As an aside, the name is pronounced “dox-hund”. I mention this because I sometimes hear it said as “dash-hound” and that bugs me. 🙂
Spaniel. (First cite 1386) From French chien espaignol, “Spanish dog”. Douglas Harper: “Whether it is actually originally Spanish is uncertain.” Fun Fact: there’s a reference to a spaniel in The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Chaucer: “For, as a spaynel, she wol on hym lepe.” (“For like a spaniel she will leap on him”)
Terrier. (First cite 1425) From Anglo-Norman terrer (“terrain, terra firma”). These dogs were bred to flush burrowing animals.
Mastiff. (First cite 1387) From a Latin word mansuētus meaning “domesticated, tame”. In other words, a house-dog.
Beagle. (First cite 1475) Origin unknown. The name might come from a French word that means “noisy person” (they do bay, don’t they) or alternatively from a word related to “[water] bay” that means “gaping, wide open”. Neither of these speculative origins is clear because there aren’t corresponding descendants in French.
Dobermann. (First cite 1917) This name is an eponym, named for Ludwig Dobermann, who first bred these dogs in the 1880s. Ludwig was a tax collector and “he aimed to create a breed that would be ideal for protecting him during his collections, which took him through many dangerous, bandit-infested areas”. (Wikipedia)
Pinscher. (First cite 1906) From German, but the derivation isn’t clear. It could be based on an adjectival form of Pinz, a region in German. Other theories suggest that pinz either refers to what the dogs do to their prey (bite, seize, pinch) or to the traditional practice of clipping the ears and tail. Today we associate Pischer with Dobermanns, but the breed existed some decades before Ludwig got involved.[4]
Basenji. (First cite 1906) Probably from the Lingála language in northern Congo, meaning “dogs of the wild ones”. A Fun Fact about basenjis: the breed is one of a handful of “basal” breeds that go waaay back, long before the development of the hundreds of breeds we know today. Basenji-looking dogs appear (PDF) in artwork that’s thousands of years old.
Corgi (First cite 1926) From Welsh cor (“dwarf”) and ci (“dog”). Corgis (or Corgwn, the plural in Welsh) were bred as herding dogs, specifically heelers, “meaning that they would nip at the heels of the larger animals to keep them on the move” (Wikipedia).
Basset hound. (First cite 1883) Possibly my favorite origin story — the name basset comes from French bas (“low”, compare bass and base), because these dogs are low to the ground. Their shorter legs make them slower than other types of hunting hounds, so bassets are suitable helpers for those hunting on foot rather than on horseback.
Obviously, there are many more breeds that also have interesting origin stories. (I covered greyhound a while back — spoiler, it’s not because they’re grey/gray.) Some involve the presumed place of origin, like Labradors, Dalmatians, Pekingese, and Rottweilers. Some involve physical characteristics or appearance, like Pug from Dutch for “small” and Shih Tzu from Mandarin for “lion”, or based on behavior, like setters and pointers. Yet other names involve the purpose of the breed, like Golden Retrievers and German Shepherds. And there’s a whole new-ish set of portmanteau names like Labradoodle (Labrador + Poodle) and Puggle (Pug + Beagle).
To go back to the beginning, I don’t expect that as I continue my Old English studies to run into a bunch of different names for different types of dogs. But if I do, I’ll definitely report back.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
[1] Interestingly, even though the replacement of a core word like the term for a dog is somewhat unexpected, it happened in some other languages as well, as with perro in Spanish.
[2] Here’s Gąsiorowski’s paper if you want the deets (and to check my work, haha): https://www.academia.edu/1499785/The_Etymology_of_Old_English_docga.
[3] It’s tempting to explore the semantic range of the word bitch as it derives from the word for female dog, but that’s sort of a different direction, and involves investigating the social implications of pejorative terms, etc., which I am reluctant to get into.
[4] Not any longer; per Wikipedia, “The Germans named the breed Dobermann-pinscher in his honor, but a half century later dropped the ‘pinscher’ on the grounds that this German word for terrier was no longer appropriate. The British did the same a few years later.”