dug

Pluraldugs

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of dig.

   The archaeologists dug carefully around the buried foundations.

   By nightfall the volunteers had dug a trench along the entire ridge.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs: she dug (simple past), and she has dug or the trench was dug (past participle, after have and be). It replaced the older regular form digged. It carries every meaning of dig, including the figurative and phrasal ones: dug up an old coin, dug out the facts. The noun spelled the same way, an animal's teat, comes from a separate word, dugge.

2. 2
   nouncountableplural

   One of the mammary glands on a domestic mammal that has more than two breasts.

   The sow lay on her side while the whole litter nursed at her dugs.

   The vet carefully examined each dug for signs of infection.

   Similarudder

   Note

   A farmyard word with a nursing root. It comes from earlier dugge and is apparently connected to Old English dēon ("to suckle"), to Danish and Swedish words for suckling and sucking, and to doe. It appears mostly in the plural, as in a sow's dugs. It has a long literary life: Shakespeare's Hamlet jokes that a courtier "did complie with his Dugge," and Shelley's pig in Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820) finds no milk in it.

3. 3
   nounvulgarcountableplural

   A vulgar term for a woman's breast or nipple.

   The sailors traded coarse jokes about the tavern girls' dugs.

   He earned a sharp slap for his leering remark about her dug.

   Similarbreast, nipple, teat, tit

   Note

   The coarseness is a later development. In Shakespeare's Richard III, a mother ashamed of her son says "from my dugges he drew not this deceit," and the line is grave, not crude. Today the word sounds vulgar, and it shares its form with a sow's or cow's teat. Like that sense, it appears mostly in the plural. In neutral speech or writing, use breast or nipple.

4. 4
   nounpronunciation spelling

   Pronunciation spelling of dog.

   "Yon dug's been chasing the sheep again," the shepherd complained.

   He spent half his pension feeding strays and his own daft dug.

   Note

   This spelling puts an accent on the page: the u tells the reader how a speaker pronounces dog, so it belongs in dialogue rather than in plain narration. It carries the ordinary senses of dog, above all the animal. Because it looks exactly like the past of dig and the word for a teat, context has to settle the meaning; "his own daft dug" can only be the animal.

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