Skip to content
OneKitly

hound

nounverbnounattested in dialogue

  • //haʊnd//

A dog, particularly a breed with a good sense of smell developed for hunting other animals.

noun

  1. 1

    A dog, particularly a breed with a good sense of smell developed for hunting other animals.

  2. 2

    Any canine animal.

  3. 3

    Someone who seeks something.

    On the way out of the building I was asked for my autograph. If I'd known who the signature hound thought I was, I would've signed appropriately.

    I still do not know if he's taken on this case because he's a glory hound, because he wants the PR, or if he simply wanted to help Anna.

  4. 4

    A male who constantly seeks the company of desirable women.

    "She had a good many successors, John." "You are such a hound, in that respect, Goodson," said Claywell, "and you have always been such a hound, that it astounds me to find you—unaccompanied."

  5. 5

    A despicable person.

    Boy! false hound!

    I turned away and left her to finish her journey in peace, feeling, but only for a moment or two, that I had been an unutterably mean hound.

    'You blackmailing hound,' the parrot said distinctly, in what Hodges recognized as General Derby's voice. Anstruther turned pale.

  6. 6

    A houndfish.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *ḱwṓder. Proto-Germanic *hundaz Proto-West Germanic *hund Old English hund Middle English hound English hound From Middle English hound, from Old English hund, from Proto-West Germanic *hund, from Proto-Germanic *hundaz. Doublet of canine. Cognate with Dutch hond (“dog”), German Hund (“dog”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish hund (“dog”), Faroese and Icelandic hundur (“dog”). In 14th-century England, hound was the general word for all domestic canines, and dog referred to a subtype resembling the modern mastiff and bulldog (much as the distinction between Hund and Dogge in contemporary German). By the 16th century, dog had become the general word, and hound had begun to refer only to breeds used for hunting.

verb

  1. 1

    To persistently harass doggedly.

    He hounded me for weeks, but I was simply unable to pay back his loan.

    More pertinently for the plot, another marked difference from history is that the United Kingdom of this 1982 is precociously computerised. Instead of having been hounded to death for his homosexuality, the scientist Alan Turing is thriving and lauded.

  2. 2

    archaicTo urge on against; to set (dogs) upon in hunting.

    We both thought we saw what had the appearance to be a fox, and hounded the dogs at it, but they would not pursue it.

Etymology

From Middle English hounden, from the noun (see above).

noun

  1. 1

    Projections located at the masthead or foremast, serving as a support for the trestletrees and top on which to rest; a foretop.

  2. 2

    A side bar used to strengthen portions of the running gear of a vehicle.

Etymology

From Middle English hownde, hount, houn, probably from Old Norse húnn, from Proto-Germanic *hūnaz.

Forms

plural
hounds
past tense
hounded
past participle
hounded
present participle
hounding
third person singular
hounds
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).