View synonyms for dog's life

dog's life

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Idioms and Phrases

A miserably unhappy existence, as in He's been leading a dog's life since his wife left him . This expression was first recorded in a 16th-century manuscript and alludes to the miserable subservient existence of dogs during this era. By the 1660s there was a proverb: “It's a dog's life, hunger and ease.”

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

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