hair of the dog

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for hair of the dog is 15 letters long, classified as a noun. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "An alcoholic drink, particularly when taken the morning after to cure a hangover.".

No misspelling variants are generated for hair of the dog in our index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: Ellipsis of hair of the dog that bit one, a folk remedy for rabies by placing hair from the dog that bites one into the wound. The use of the phrase as a metaphor for a hangover treatment dates at least to the 16ᵗʰ century. The principle of “curing like wit… 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 hair of the dog, spelled H-A-I-R- -O-F- -T-H-E- -D-O-G, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.