Dog end
Posted by Gary Martin on October 27, 2007
In Reply to: Dog end posted by pamela on October 27, 2007
: : I searched for weeks but cants find the origins of the phrase 'dog end' as in the cigarette butt
:
: allwords.com says it's from the 1930s, but that's all. Pamela
Partridge's Dictionary of Slang asserts that it is from the 1920s and surmises that it is a corruption of 'docked end', i.e. a cigarette that has been nipped off and kept for later.
It could also be one of the many uses of 'dog' as a prefix, denoting a bad or mongrel variety of something - 'dog-Latin', 'dog's breakfast' etc.