pup
Americannoun
-
pups
plural
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a young dog; puppy.
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the young of certain other animals, as the rat, shark, or fur seal.
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a small plant developing as an offshoot from a mature plant.
verb (used without object)
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pups,
present (3rd person singular)
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pupped,
past participle, past
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pupping
present participle
noun
-
-
a young dog, esp when under one year of age; puppy
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the young of various other animals, such as the seal
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(of a bitch) pregnant
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informal a conceited young man (esp in the phrase young pup )
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to swindle someone by selling him something worthless
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slang it's early yet
verb
Other Word Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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pupsimple
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pupssimple
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have puppedperfect
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has puppedperfect
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am puppingprogressive
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are puppingprogressive
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is puppingprogressive
-
have been puppingperfect progressive
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has been puppingperfect progressive
Past
-
puppedsimple
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had puppedperfect
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was puppingprogressive
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were puppingprogressive
-
had been puppingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of pup
First recorded in 1580–90; shortened variant of puppy
Explanation
Even though you probably think of a young, cuddly dog when you hear the word pup, a pup is the correct name for the young of many different mammals (even the not-so-cuddly porcupine!). When your dog has babies, they're pups, and the same is true of baby wolves. What's more surprising is that so are the baby anteaters in the zoo, as well as the offspring of sea lions, gerbils, and mongooses, among others. Sometimes this noun is also used to mean a young person who's particularly naive or arrogant. Pup comes from puppy, from the Middle French poupée, "doll."
Vocabulary lists containing pup
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Happy ending for stray pup that sparked wild tarmac chase.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 23, 2026
At one point in the clip, the white pup gazes adoringly at the NFL star before hopping onto a couch to snuggle beside him while Kelce lovingly pets the pooch.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 7, 2026
Sayers also expressed concern about this year's seal pup season, describing it as one of the worst on record.
From BBC ● Sep. 5, 2026
Even if we were willing to accept that Hig might deliberately crash his plane, we can’t buy for a second that he’d hurt his sweet pup.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 28, 2026
So what use did I have for a pup?
From "Old Yeller" by Fred Gipson
"More than half of the seal pups we've recorded so far this year have been dead or dying."
From BBC ● Sep. 5, 2026
When temperatures rise, the females abandon their pups to hunt for food, he explained.
From Barron's ● Jul. 27, 2026
Bird flu has killed thousands of southern elephant seal pups on remote Antarctic islands belonging to Australia, new research has shown.
From BBC ● Jun. 18, 2026
When I visited Simba Safari in early January, Miguel was a new dad: Three pups were born in December, and a second of his three girlfriends was pregnant.
From Slate ● May 27, 2026
I tied the dogs off so they wouldn’t run—again, I had some pups in the team and they were insane, especially after finding the grouse—and I went to the nest.
From "Woodsong" by Gary Paulsen
He rested again; then he continued: "That—that there dog was pupped on the track," he said, with a sad sort of a smile.
From While the Billy Boils by Henry Lawson
Some dogs are pupped in this condition; others are only affected in this way when age has far advanced.
From The Dog by Dinks
I tell you and your friends that it was not wolves that were pupped in the sand of the shaggy Prussian forests when the first Hohenzollern was dropped.
From The Crimson Tide A Novel by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
A thought struck me: one of the many curs, which range wild throughout Tehran, had just pupped under a ruined archway, close to our house.
From The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan by James Morier
The creature was but pupped the day we left New York, six weeks come Tuesday.
From The Refugees by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Experts will also use ultrasound scanning to identify pregnant sharks and locate potential pupping and nursery grounds.
From BBC ● Jul. 19, 2026
"Although all of the cownose rays in Bermuda to date are females, we also observed small, immature rays suggesting pupping may have recently occurred here," said Ajemian.
From Science Daily ● May 20, 2024
On my drive home, I became intent on documenting harp seals as a face of the climate crisis and have returned to the gulf’s pupping grounds over and over again for the past decade.
From National Geographic ● Jan. 23, 2024
The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 made it safe for the seals to return from Canadian waters, but they didn’t establish pupping colonies until the early 1990s.
From Scientific American ● Jul. 2, 2023
The pupping time was passed when Bass sailed through, and many of the females had gone to sea, as is their habit.
From The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders by Ernest Scott
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
