dog
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
3 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "dog", 3-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "dog" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "dog" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
dog is aEnglishnoun. It means: A mammal of the family Canidae: Pronounced /dɒɡ/. It ranks #826 in English word frequency. Often confused with Dr and DS.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | dog |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /dɒɡ/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #826 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for dog is 3 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /dɒɡ/. Corpus data places it at rank #826 in overall English word frequency, putting it firmly in the everyday core of the language.Wiktionary records 22 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for dog in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "Dr", "DS", "DT", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Old English [Term?]? Proto-Germanic *-gô Proto-West Germanic *-gō Old English -ga Old English dogga Middle English dogge English dog Inherited from Middle English dogge (akin to Scots dug), from Old English dogga, docga, of uncertain origin. … Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is dog, spelled D-O-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A mammal of the family Canidae:
- 2A mammal of the family Canidae:
- 3A mammal of the family Canidae:
- 4The meat of this animal, eaten as food.
- 5A person:
- 6A person:
- 7A person:
- 8A person:
- 9A mechanical device or support:
- 10A mechanical device or support:
- 11A mechanical device or support:
- 12A mechanical device or support:
- 13The eighteenth Lenormand card.
- 14A hot dog: a frankfurter, wiener, or similar sausage; or a sandwich made from this.
- 15An underdog.
- 16Foot; toe.
- 17(from "dog and bone") Phone or mobile phone.
- 18One of the cones used to divide up a racetrack when training horses.
- 19Something that performs poorly.
- 20Something that performs poorly.
- 21A cock, as of a gun.
- 22A dance having a brief vogue in the 1960s in which the actions of a dog were mimicked.
Etymology
Etymology tree Old English [Term?]? Proto-Germanic *-gô Proto-West Germanic *-gō Old English -ga Old English dogga Middle English dogge English dog Inherited from Middle English dogge (akin to Scots dug), from Old English dogga, docga, of uncertain origin. The original meaning seems to have been a common dog, as opposed to a well-bred one, or something like 'cur', and perhaps later came to be used for stocky dogs. Possibly a pet-form diminutive with suffix -ga (compare frocga (“frog”), *picga (“pig”)), appended to a base *dog-, *doc- of unclear origin and meaning. One possibility is Old English dox (“dark, swarthy”) (compare frocga from frox). Another proposal is that it derives from Proto-West Germanic *dugan (“to be suitable”), the origin of Old English dugan (“to be good, worthy, useful”), English dow, Dutch deugen, German taugen. The theory goes that it could have been an epithet for dogs, commonly used by children, meaning "good/useful animal". Another is that it is related to *docce (“stock, muscle”), from Proto-West Germanic *dokkā (“round mass, ball, muscle, doll”), whence English dock (“stumpy tail”). In 14th-century England, hound (from Old English hund) was the general word for all domestic canines, and dog referred to a subtype resembling the modern mastiff and bulldog. By the 16th century, dog had become the general word, and hound had begun to refer only to breeds used for hunting. In the 16th century, the word dog was adopted by several continental European languages as their word for mastiff. Despite similarities in forms and meaning, not related to Mbabaram dog.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #826 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter D in our English index: