mongrel
/ˈmʌŋɡr(ə)l
/noun
1A dog of no definable type or breed: she’s a particularly intelligent mongrel with a lot of collie in her [as modifier]: three-week-old mongrel pups...
- The mongrel hounds rushed up a slope, into a stand of scrub.
- He lies in the nest for tonight, taken from a stray mutt and her mongrel puppies.
- Lily the mongrel puppy was one of the first pooches to go online to promote a stray dogs website in North Yorkshire.
Synonyms
cross-bred, mixed-breed, half-breed, hybrid
1.1Any animal resulting from the crossing of different breeds or types.He has done workshops with farmers in Cambodia and his findings support the general belief that many farmed animals are genetic mongrels....
- Because they have lived alongside each other for so long, true Scottish wildcats and crossbred mongrels are difficult to tell apart.
- They are mating with the local rare species of white-headed duck producing a mongrel that could force the indigenous breed into extinction.
Synonyms
cross-breed, cross, mixed breed, half-breed, hybrid;
tyke, cur, mutt;
North American yellow dog;
New Zealand kuri;
Asian pye-dog, pariah dog
informal Heinz 57
Australian informal mong, bitzer
technical bigener
1.2 offensive A person of mixed descent: she was a mongrel, only half French
Derivatives
mongrelism
/ noun ...- Apparently the correct definition of his mongrelism is that he is a retriever and Tibetan spaniel cross.
- His desire for an anti-colonial mongrelism might be one way to negotiate between two contradictory realities of Hawai'i: the mixing of its cultures and the separate rights of its indigenous peoples.
- It has all the hybrid vigour of mongrelism and once they learn to speak it properly, world cultural domination will be complete.
Origin
Late Middle English: of Germanic origin, apparently from a base meaning 'mix', and related to mingle and among.