Word.ws English Dictionary

one man and a dog

one man and a dog is the alternative form of one man and his dog.

Meaning of one man and his dog

Noun

one man and his dog

  1. (idiomatic) Almost nobody; very few people.
    • People around here tell me that they can remember the days when the hospital was run by just one man and his dog. Then people knew everyone by name and it was quite common to find a boss who knew details of his staff's domestic lives. Things have certainly changed today.1984, Nursing Times
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see one, man, dog.

Questions about one man and a dog

What is one man and a dog the alternative form of?
One man and a dog is the alternative form of one man and his dog.

Words near one man and a dog in the dictionary

  1. one liner
  2. one liners
  3. one little duck
  4. one love
  5. one Ls
  6. one man and a dog
  7. one man and his dog
  8. one man band
  9. one man bands
  10. one man's fish is another man's poison
  11. one man's fish is another man's poisson

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: one man and a dog (page history and authors); one man and his 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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Cite this entry: “one man and a dog.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/one_man_and_a_dog. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.