An animal that performs valuable service to humans, often with reference to dogs.

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 for dogs felt 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 the origin of the word ‘dog’. 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 about which no one is at all sure.

Prior to the 18th century dogs were kept for hunting and defence and not as pets. The only deviation from that rule was that of the derided ‘lap-dog’, which John Evelyn recorded in his Diary, circa 1684, as a dog fit only for ladies:

Those Lap-dogs had so in delicijs [delight] by the Ladies – are a pigmie sort of Spaniels.