Word.ws English Dictionary

pup tent

pup tent noun: a shelter tent.

Noun

pup tent (plural pup tents)

  1. A shelter tent.
  2. (US, historical) A shelter half, one of two halves comprising a shelter tent or dog tent.
    • Colonel Elbridge Colby in Army Talk tells us that the shelter-half, or “pup tent” made its debut during the Civil War. It seems to have been first christened “pup tent” by the Sixth Iowa Infantry at Memphis in 1862 and appears to stem etymologically from the same soldierly self-ridicule that...1947 July, J.F.L., “Tenting Tonight”, in Infantry Journal, page 37

Forms of pup tent

pluralpup tents

Origin of pup tent

Compound of pup (“puppy, small dog”) + tent, from dog tent, military slang for a shelter tent. Attested from the late 19th century.

Questions about pup tent

What does pup tent mean?
Pup tent means a shelter tent.
What part of speech is pup tent?
Pup tent is a noun.
What is the plural of pup tent?
The plural of pup tent is pup tents.

Words near pup tent in the dictionary

  1. pup cup
  2. pup cups
  3. pup hood
  4. pup hoods
  5. pup play
  6. pup tent
  7. pup tents
  8. pupa
  9. pupacidal
  10. pupacide
  11. pupacides

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pup tent (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: “pup tent.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pup_tent. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.