Word.ws English Dictionary

dog year

dog year noun: a period of time in the life of dogs, defined such that the average life expectancy of a dog in "dog years" is numerically equivalent to the average life expectancy of a human. A 4- and a 5-year-old dog are about as mature as a human of 28 to 30 years and 33 to 35 years, respectively. The most common calculation uses a ratio of seven dog years to one human year.

Noun

dog year (plural dog years)

  1. (informal) A period of time in the life of dogs, defined such that the average life expectancy of a dog in "dog years" is numerically equivalent to the average life expectancy of a human. A 4- and a 5-year-old dog are about as mature as a human of 28 to 30 years and 33 to 35 years, respectively. The most common calculation uses a ratio of seven dog years to one human year.
    • 90 minutes of almost nonstop hilarity is a good entertainment value. Especially if you're counting in dog years.2004 June 15, Robert Hurwitt, “Giddy spiral down the Amazon.com workers' inferno”, in San Francisco Chronicle
  2. A unit of age relative to the species being considered, defined such that an animal's age in "dog years" is the equivalent age of a dog in calendar years.

Forms of dog year

pluraldog years

Questions about dog year

What does dog year mean?
Dog year means a period of time in the life of dogs, defined such that the average life expectancy of a dog in "dog years" is numerically equivalent to the average life expectancy of a human. A 4- and a 5-year-old dog are about as mature as a human of 28 to 30 years and 33 to 35 years, respectively. The most common calculation uses a ratio of seven dog years to one human year.
What part of speech is dog year?
Dog year is a noun.
What is the plural of dog year?
The plural of dog year is dog years.

Words near dog year in the dictionary

  1. dog whelks
  2. dog whistle
  3. dog whistle politics
  4. dog whistles
  5. dog who caught the tire
  6. dog year
  7. dog years
  8. dog's
  9. dog's abuse
  10. dog's age
  11. dog's ballocks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dog year (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 year.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dog_year. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.