Word.ws English Dictionary

one man and his dog

one man and his dog noun: almost nobody; very few people.

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
    • We have stressed that this is the kind of work which not just one man and his dog could carry out, it needed input from various different specialisms,^([sic]) and we were looking particularly for collaborative approaches which would allow the measurement and toxicology and so on all to be dealt...2010, UK House of Lords. Science and Technology Committee, Nanotechnologies and Food: Evidence, →ISBN, page 283
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see one, man, dog.

Examples of one man and his dog in a sentence

  • [...] he could foresee a huge manufacturing complex operated by one man and his dog ...2012, Paul Arthur, CADCAM: Training and Education through the ’80s: Proceedings of the CAD ED ’84 Conference, Springer Science & Business...
  • Rodgers' pregame press conference was rammed, whilst Pellegrini's was attended by one man and his dog as tumbleweeds drifted by.2015, Neil Collins, Red Mist: A Fan's View of the 2014/15 Season, →ISBN, page 24:
  • And not just blogs read only by one man and his dog.2017, Alan Charlesworth, Social Media Marketing: Marketing Panacea or the Emperor’s New Digital Clothes?, Business Expert Press, →ISBN:

Synonyms of one man and his dog

Forms of one man and his dog

alternative formone man and a dog

Questions about one man and his dog

What does one man and his dog mean?
One man and his dog means almost nobody; very few people.
How do you use one man and his dog in a sentence?
[...] he could foresee a huge manufacturing complex operated by one man and his dog ...
What part of speech is one man and his dog?
One man and his dog is a noun.

Words near one man and his dog in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: 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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