Sid from Dallas, Texas, works at an animal shelter where staffers lovingly refer to the many large, tan mixed-breed dogs there as Texas brown dogs, or TBDs. Are there other colorful regional terms for mutts? In the U.S., they’ve been known as...
Critters, co-workers, and clothes: What do you call your favorite mixed-breed dog? There are Heinz 57 mutts and Texas brown dogs in the U.S., while in parts of the Caribbean they’re called potcakes and coconut retrievers. Plus, among firefighters...
If you speak a second or third language, you may remember the first time you dreamed in that new tongue. But does this milestone mean you’re actually fluent? And a couple’s dispute over the word regret: Say you wish you’d been able...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski’s canine word quiz pads through English shaped by dogs, from internet doggo lingo to older surprises such as mutt. The mechanism is simple: each clue asks for a dog-related word, source, or coined blend. One clue starts with...
Mary Jean Mueckenheim of Windsor, Vt., asks: What’s the origin of the word mutt? Our recent “Double Dog Dare” quiz about mixed-breed dogs has her thinking about that term. She wonders, “Did the word mutt come from the word...
What do you get when you mix a shelty and a cocker? A shocker! Or how about a dachshund and a border collie? That’d make it a dashboard. We don’t want to know what you’d call a cross between a pit bull and shih tzu. This is part of...