Word.ws English Dictionary

hound-dog

hound-dog verb: to aggressively, relentlessly, or single-mindedly pursue something, often a person for romantic or sexual interest.

Verb

hound-dog (third-person singular simple present hound-dogs, present participle hound-dogging, simple past and past participle hound-dogged)

  1. (intransitive, slang, transitive, uncommon) To aggressively, relentlessly, or single-mindedly pursue something, often a person for romantic or sexual interest.
    • Taylor denied that McCann asked where he was supposed to turn his gear in, but agreed that he asked the real reason why McCann quit, to which McCann answered he felt like he was being hound-dogged too much.1977, United States, National Labor Relations Board, Decisions and Orders of the National Labor Relations Board, Volume 224, page 853
    • And you get a lesson in turkey behavior by hound-dogging the footsteps of these shrewd giants.1978, Dennis Walrod, “Stalking The Monster Birds”, in Field & Stream, volume 83, number 6, page 158

Examples of hound-dog in a sentence

  • "You ought to be hound-dogging the murderer instead of terrorizing little old ladies."2007, Cindy Keen Reynders, The Saucy Lucy Murders, Book One in the Saucy Lucy Series:
  • The night-fighters hound-dogged the three bombers for over a hundred miles but never managed to pull within effective firing range.2019, Steven K. Bailey, Bold Venture, The American Bombing of Japanese-Occupied Hong Kong, 1942–1945, page 60:

Forms of hound-dog

third-person singular presenthound-dogs
present participlehound-dogging
past participlehound-dogged
pasthound-dogged
alternative formhounddog

Questions about hound-dog

What does hound-dog mean?
Hound-dog means to aggressively, relentlessly, or single-mindedly pursue something, often a person for romantic or sexual interest.
How do you use hound-dog in a sentence?
"You ought to be hound-dogging the murderer instead of terrorizing little old ladies."
What part of speech is hound-dog?
Hound-dog is a verb.
What is the past tense of hound-dog?
The past tense of hound-dog is hound-dogged.

Words near hound-dog in the dictionary

  1. hound's tongue
  2. hound's tongues
  3. hound's tooth
  4. hound's-tongue
  5. hound's-tongues
  6. hound-dog
  7. hound-dogged
  8. hound-dogging
  9. hound-dogs
  10. hounddog
  11. hounddogged

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hound-dog (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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