dogs

[sweet&soft]

Etymology and taxonomy
The English word dog, in common usage, refers to the domestic pet dog,
Canis lupus familiaris. The species was originally classified as Canis
familiaris and "Canis familiarus domesticus" by Linnaeus in 1758 [3].
In 1993, dogs were reclassified as a subspecies of the gray wolf,
Canis lupus, by the Smithsonian Institution and the American Society
of Mammalogists. "Dog" is sometimes used to refer collectively to any
mammal belonging to the family Canidae (as in "the dog family"), such
as wolves, foxes, and coyotes. Some members of the family have "dog"
in their common names, such as the Raccoon Dog and the African Wild
Dog. A few animals have "dog" in their common names but are not
canids, such as the prairie dog. The English word dog might derive
from the Old English docga, a "powerful breed of canine". The English
word hound is a cognate of German Hund, Dutch hond, common
Scandinavian hund, Icelandic hundur which, though referring to a
specific breed in English, means "dog" in general in the other
Germanic languages. Hound itself is derived from the Proto-Indo-
European *kwon-, which is the direct root of the Greek κυων (kuōn) and
the indirect root of the Latin canis through the variant form *kani-.
[4]

In breeding circles, a male canine is referred to as a dog, while a
female canine is called a bitch. The father of a litter is called the
sire, and the mother of a litter is called the dam. Offspring are
generally called pups or puppies until they are about a year old. A
group of offspring is a litter. The process of birth is whelping. Many
terms are used for dogs that are not purebred.[5]

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