Word.ws English Dictionary

wag the dog

wag the dog verb: to divert negative political attention by use of a military operation.

Verb

wag the dog (third-person singular simple present wags the dog, present participle wagging the dog, simple past and past participle wagged the dog)

  1. (idiomatic) To divert negative political attention by use of a military operation.
  2. Used in a phrasal verb: the tail wags the dog: to control, as a minor part, a larger thing; to be the tail wagging the dog.

Forms of wag the dog

third-person singular presentwags the dog
present participlewagging the dog
past participlewagged the dog
pastwagged the dog

Origin of wag the dog

From the tail wagging the dog / the tail wags the dog, first used in the 1858 play, Our American Cousin. The shortened form with the political sense was popularized by the film Wag the Dog (1997).

Questions about wag the dog

What does wag the dog mean?
Wag the dog means to divert negative political attention by use of a military operation.
What part of speech is wag the dog?
Wag the dog is a verb.
What is the past tense of wag the dog?
The past tense of wag the dog is wagged the dog.

Words near wag the dog in the dictionary

  1. wag a finger
  2. wag hemp
  3. wag it
  4. wag one
  5. wag one's finger
  6. wag the dog
  7. wag-at-the-wall
  8. wag-halter
  9. wag-halters
  10. wag-on-the-wall
  11. wag-pastie

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wag the 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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-wag the dog.ogg.

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