The term dog pound sounds a lot more menacing than animal shelter, until you learn that pound simply has to do with the idea of an enclosed space, as does a pond, which is often formed by enclosing a space and filling it with water. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Pound vs. Shelter”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Erin from Tallahassee, Florida.
Hi, Erin.
Hey, Erin, how you doing?
I have a question about the word pound, as in like the animal shelter pound.
I have two dogs, and I adopted both of them from different shelters.
And it occurred to me one day that, you know, some animal shelters are referred to as the pound.
And it sounds, I don’t know, meaner or less humane to me, but at the same time, you know, animal shelters can be kill shelters, so that’s not exactly humane.
So I was just wondering where that term, the pound, came from.
Interesting. Yeah, the term animal shelter itself didn’t take off until the 1970s or so.
Oh, okay.
But yeah, I remember from my childhood talking about the pound, but you don’t hear that so much anymore.
I only knew the pound from, like, cartoons.
Oh, really?
Yeah, where the dog catcher was chasing the dogs and their hijinks.
Yeah, yeah.
That’s what I always remember is the, like, the, I think it’s, I don’t know, some dog is, like, lost in the city in the pound.
The dog catcher’s going to take the pound.
That’s the vision I have when I hear the word.
Interesting.
Yeah, the word pound goes way, way, way back to the late 1300s, I believe, just as a term for an enclosed space or enclosed area.
And in fact, it’s a linguistic relative of the word pond, which is also sometimes formed when you dam up a river or something.
So you make a round enclosure for the water.
Yeah, like an artificial enclosure like that.
So pound was used for centuries.
And originally it was mostly cattle, right, to stop cattle from straying into your garden or your wheat fields.
Yeah, yeah, your herd animals that are wandering loose.
They would be put in a pound, and later that was used for stray dogs and stray cats and that kind of thing.
So it’s a very old word.
So it has nothing to do with, like, the impound lot for animals.
Well, it does in that impound is a verb that was formed from the word pound.
You know, which a car impounded.
You’re putting them in the pound.
The I-M is actually the same etymological root as I-N.
It literally means in the pound.
Yeah, but it goes back to an old word meaning enclosure.
Erin, thank you so much for calling.
Give us a ring some other time, too.
Thank you.
Okay.
Thank you for taking my call.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
I have to ask you this.
Yes.
It’s not related to compound, right?
Yes.
Oh, now this is strange, right?
This is really strange and really interesting.
The word compound goes all the way back to a Malay term.
Malay, like from Malaysia.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They got picked up by the Dutch and the Portuguese back in the 1600s.
And it sounds like the word compound is something like compound or something like that.
And it found its way into English as compound because it makes sense.
There’s a little bit of overlap semantically.
Yes.
And we confirmed the spelling to look a little like the English word.
Exactly.
But they’re not related emologically.
Right.
If you’re talking about the Kennedy compound up in New England, it derives from Malay.
From an Asian language.
That’s really cool.
Isn’t that wild?
English.
You know, we should do a show about that.
Gosh, let’s do that, Grant.
Let’s see.
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