Word.ws English Dictionary

dog years

dog years is the plural of dog year.

Meaning of dog 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.

Questions about dog years

What is dog years the plural of?
Dog years is the plural of dog year.

Words near dog years in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dog years (page history and authors); 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.

Last updated:

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