A reader, whose name is beyond recall because my husband put his letter in a safe place, is unhappy at the general ignorance of the origin of the word dog, and wonders if I can throw any light.
My lamp is burning, with spare oil at hand, but the footsteps of the dog are as invisible as ever. I don’t know if it’s more extraordinary how many words we know the origins of, or the commonness of the words of which we remain ignorant — bun, bird and pig, for example. For dogs, hound is the word we once used, as hunting folk do now, but suddenly in the 11th century dog popped up. At first it was used of a particularly fierce kind of creature. In about 1225 the eremitical author of the Ancrene Rule, who I seem to remember kept a cat, likens the very devil to a dog.
It is no good looking to European countries for the origins of dog, as the French dogue, the Dutch doghe and the Italian dogo were all in the Middle Ages connected with the characteristic ‘English’.
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