Home British & World English dog food

Definition of dog food in English:

dog food

(also dogfood)

noun

mass noun

  • Commercially prepared food for dogs.

    ‘a can of dog food’
    • ‘Gourmet dog food will transform your cantankerous mutt into an obedient show dog.’
    • ‘They're dog-friendly, and they had a tray there with water and dog food.’
    • ‘So the problem isn't getting dogs to eat the dog food - it's getting them to stop!’
    • ‘However, because Cleo had spent his life eating human food, Mary said he wouldn't touch the dog food she tried to give him.’
    • ‘Just how difficult is it to get dogs to eat dog food?’
    • ‘So I signed the papers, and bought dog food and the like, and soon enough I had Finn walking home with me.’
    • ‘You should make sure your dog eats a good-quality dog food, one that is complete and balanced.’
    • ‘He does admit that some dogs might be a little pickier than others and says that other companies often add sugar, garlic, and salt to their dog food to get Rover to come over.’
    • ‘When Hal realizes one day that the dog food is half gone already and they are only one quarter of the way to Dawson City, he reduces everyone's ration and increases the amount of time that the dogs pull each day.’
    • ‘Have you ever read the ingredients in the teeny, tiny print on a tin of commercial dog food?’
    • ‘Plus it does hand-made dog biscuits and dog food that contains kobe beef, fresh eggs and homegrown vegetables.’
    • ‘At night time lay out dog food, which they love to eat - don't use bread or milk because it's bad for them.’
    • ‘She'll eat the cat food, the dog food, anything.’
    • ‘Among the more obvious endorsements to come are for flea collars and dog food.’
    • ‘A man shopping in a supermarket brought his purchase of two cans of dog food to the checkout counter.’
    • ‘At her age, her stomach is too sensitive to handle regular dog food.’
    • ‘I went down to the basement, where the dry dog food is kept, and scooped the proper amount into her enormous bowl, then went back to the kitchen.’
    • ‘We stopped at our local grocery store and picked up a bag of dry dog food, a plastic squeeze toy in the shape of a bone, and a real bone in the shape of a bone.’
    • ‘Do not feed cat food to your dog, or dog food to your cat.’
    • ‘It's during this stage that the switch from puppy to adult dog food should be made.’

verb

[with object]informalComputing

  • (of a company's staff) use a product or service developed by that company so as to test it before it is made available to customers.

    ‘it was a great opportunity to dogfood the phones’
    • ‘I was definitely "dogfooding" for the apps I built at work.’
    • ‘We started dogfooding the product when it was only 700 lines of code, and even in that super-simple form, we found it incredibly useful.’
    • ‘"Unfortunately, because dogfooding is a process exclusively for Google employees, we cannot share specific product details."’
    • ‘Through such dog-fooding, Google learned that the early version of its calendar program was not robust enough to meet a corporate user's need.’
    • ‘Does this extend to the software giant's in-house IT operations and its longstanding practice of dogfooding its own products?’
    • ‘Did the more formal approach to dogfooding coincide with the company's increased emphasis on the enterprise?’
    • ‘Part of our "QA" is to put up test releases in a shared location for employees to dogfood.’
    • ‘Dogfooding the API is the only way to really know what's useful.’
    • ‘Dogfooding the app has resulted in many user experience (UX) changes, many of which should improve the product.’

Phrases

    eat one's own dog food
    Computing
    informal

    • (of a company's staff) use a product or service developed by that company so as to test it before it is made available to customers.

      ‘we had to eat our own dog food—we had to make sure the tools worked’
      • ‘Sound like a pipe dream? IBM will try to prove it isn't by "eating its own dog food."’
      • ‘Eating our own dog food means that we have to stay on the cutting edge of what's out there.’
      • ‘But the failure of the BBC to eat its own dog food is less than a ringing endorsement.’
      • ‘In a move he described as "eating our own dog food", the company is moving all internal desktops to open source software.’
      • ‘My brain is still spinning from ETech, where we were eating our own dog food all week trying out social software during the show.’
      • ‘And the product development cycle must go on, and we are getting towards the part in the product development cycle where you have to eat your own dog food.’
      • ‘And being in the technology business, we think it's important that we eat our own dog food, in terms of using the technology and e-business tools internally.’
      • ‘We'll focus on improving our product, and we'll focus on staying in business, by listening to our customers and eating our own dog food, instead of flying all over the country trying to raise more venture capital.’
      • ‘It was signing up members at a furious rate, in part because it provided a better user experience than we did, and we didn't understand that, because we didn't eat our own dog food.’
      • ‘It needed to have the right people who would want to build the app for themselves and eat their own dogfood.’
      • ‘The developers will use it because the program manager makes them eat their own dogfood.’
      • ‘The company is also "eating its own dogfood" by operating the services internally.’