How Big is a Dog's Vocabulary?

As a dog owner, I often find myself guilty of spelling out words so that our dog won't understand what I'm talking about. That's because even a casual mention of the word "walk" within earshot of our dog sends her running off to fetch a leash with all unrestrained emotion of a child running into his mother's arms after completing his first day of kindergarten. If I'm simply discussing the possibility of going for a W-A-L-K with my wife, it's not fair to get the dog's hopes up until we've made the decision of whether we're going or not. After one such occasion, I began to wonder just how much of the human vocabulary my dog understands.

We have not made any particular effort to teach our three-year-old German shepherd-collie mix much in the way of commands. Sure, we taught her sit, stay, down and a few of the most basic commands, but words like walk, she picked up on her own. Just how many words did our dog know and, with dedicated training, how many could a dog learn, I wondered.

I ran through a series of words that I suspected our dog might have picked up, simple things like the names of several toys, family member's names, and some simple commands. I found that based on the spoken words alone, our dog was easily able to differentiate between different toys like Frisbee, ball, stick, and rope. She also knew the names of all three family members, and our older dog.

In all, I easily found 27 words that our dog demonstrated that she understood very well. I'm sure there are more that simply didn't occur to me to test at the time. Furthermore, our dog was able to understand simple sentences or word groupings. If I said "ride" she would run to the driveway and wait expectantly, but if I said "ride van" or "ride car," she ran and waited by the right by door of the appropriate vehicle.

Average Dog Vocabulary

As it turns out, a vocabulary of 27 words clearly understood by a dog is barely scratching the surface of canine capabilities. Although canine working or obedience intelligence varies by breed, says Dr. Stanley Coren, a neuropsychologist at the University of British Columbia in his book "the Intelligence of Dogs," published by Bantam in 1995, the average dog can learn 165 words, and some very smart dogs can retain working vocabularies of about 250 words. Furthermore, Coren said, in a report published by Science Daily, dogs can learn to count up to four or five, and will even try to deceive humans for their own gain.

World Record Dog Vocabulary

The world record holder for a dog vocabulary is currently a border collie named Chaser who, says a report on Discovery News, was able to learn an astounding 1,022 words and perform as well as a three-year-old in categorizing objects by color and shape.

So far, though, we're still safe when we spell out words to keep our dogs out of our conversations.

How smart is your dog? Share your dog's vocabulary and other feats of intelligence in the comment section below.

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