A dog is a man's best friend? Well, if the animal's popularity is anything to go by, perhaps that's true; according to the American Kennel Club, there are more pet dogs in the USA than there are people in Britain. However, the affection in which dogs are held by many these days is a fairly recent development. How we used to think about dogs can be judged by looking at how they have been portrayed in language over the centuries.
The first linguistic oddity to do with dogs concerns where the word 'dog' came from. The name was preceded by the perfectly good Anglo-Saxon word 'hound', which was also used in other European languages. 'Dog', in common with several other animal names ending in 'g', like frog, hog, pig and stag, seems to have been coined around the 13th century for reasons that no one is at all sure about.
Meaning
An animal that performs valuable service to humans, often with reference to dogs.
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