Word.ws English Dictionary

dog Latin

dog Latin proper noun: a phrase or jargon that imitates Latin, often by translating English words (or those of other languages) into Latin by conjugating or declining them.

Proper noun (1)

dog Latin

  1. A phrase or jargon that imitates Latin, often by translating English words (or those of other languages) into Latin by conjugating or declining them.
    • Now that walking plants were established facts, the press lost its former tepidity and bathed them in publicity. So a name had to be found for them. Already there were botanists wallowing, after their custom, in polysyllabic dog-Latin and Greek to produce variants on ambulans and pseudopodia, but...1951, John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, published 1954, page 41
  2. Poor-quality or erroneous Latin.

Proper noun (2) capitalized: Dog Latin

Dog Latin

  1. Alternative letter-case form of dog Latin.

Synonyms of dog Latin

Forms of dog Latin

alternative formDog Latin

Origin of dog Latin

The term Dog Latin dates back to at least the 17th century and is thought to derive from the notion of doggerel, a word meaning rough, irregular, or trivial verse. Chambers (1908) suggests that the word reflects the idea of a clumsy, bastardized form of Latin, as if produced by dogs rather than by scholars. The adjective dog in this sense was historically used to indicate something inferior or absurd, paralleling its use in expressions like dog's breakfast or doggerel. The term thus conveys the idea of a humorous or intentionally incorrect imitation of classical Latin.

Questions about dog Latin

What does dog Latin mean?
Dog Latin means a phrase or jargon that imitates Latin, often by translating English words (or those of other languages) into Latin by conjugating or declining them.
What part of speech is dog Latin?
Dog Latin is a proper noun.

Words near dog Latin in the dictionary

  1. dog in the manger
  2. dog in the race
  3. Dog Island
  4. Dog Islands
  5. dog it
  6. dog Latin
  7. dog lead
  8. dog leads
  9. dog man
  10. dog meat
  11. dog men

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dog Latin (page history and authors); Dog Latin (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “dog Latin.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dog_latin. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.