wordnerd: today's word: dog

Yesterday, Jim asked me what the etymology of the word pooch was, so I told him I'd look into it. Here's the answer: Nobody knows. Pooch was first recorded in 1924, it's American English in origin, it's an affectionate or informal term for to all dogs (not just mutts) but that's the end of our knowledge. Pooch just showed up at English's back door one day, and we took it in and gave it a home.

It makes sense, really. The word dog (or rather, the Old English word dogca) itself just magically appeared in English in the 13th Century. No one knows where it came from. But it was used very rarely and only to refer to a specific breed of dog until the 16th Century when, for more reasons unknown, it supplanted hund (still the German, Swedish and Danish word for "dog"), as the English word for the loyal and fuzzy quadruped. Hund lives on in hound, but that word has lost its general meaning and now refers almost exclusively to hunting dogs. (Oddly, the word hunt, despite the similarities, is not related to hund at all -- it comes from the Old English hentan, "to seize.")

Hund started out as the Indo-European word kuntos, which indicates that dogs were a part of human life in some fashion even back in the earliest days of language. Kuntos became the Greek kyon, which interestingly, and unexpectedly, is also the root for cynic (from kynikos, "dog-like"). Legend has it those ancient Greek philosophers the Cynics were so named for their "dog-like sneering" at the weakness of their fellow humans, but more likely the name came from the Kynosarge (meaning "grey dog"), the school where the group's founder Antisthenes taught.

The Latin word for dog, canis, is the root of (obviously) the adjective canine, but also the words kennel and canary. The little birds, which were introduced as caged pets in England in the 16th Century, were so named because they came from Spain's Canary Islands, which gained fame during Roman times for the large breed of dog found there. See, it all comes back to dogs.

word·nerd·dot·net