The Quirkiness of a Dog’s Bark

The dog of chickenmonkeydog barking

In US English (and perhaps in other variations of English), a dog says “bark-bark”, or sometimes “ruff-ruff”. I am aware that other languages use different words for a dog’s barking sound. However, it strikes me as odd that the word bark in English means both the sound a dog makes as well as the outer skin of a tree. So I wonder if other animal sounds — either in English or in other languages — have multiple meanings, like the word bark.

4 comments

  1. how about “quack?” the duck and the phoney.
    sometimes a dog may say “woof” a term seem in weaving.

  2. For the technologist: how about ‘tweet’ as in ‘a little bird tweets’ and in ‘he sent me a tweet on Twitter’?

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