Meaning
A mess, muddle, or badly botched job; something thrown together without care, order, or polish. It is chiefly British, informal, and always derogatory, applied to anything from a chaotic document or a bungled policy to an untidy room or a dismal design. Informal and insulting, so keep it for things rather than people unless you mean to be rude. Do not confuse it with 'done up like a dog's dinner', which means overdressed, not messy. Regional use: Chiefly British English.
Origin
The image is the jumbled heap of scraps once ladled into a dog's bowl. Etymonline dates 'a dog's breakfast' from 1908 and treats it as an extension of 'a dog's dinner', which originally meant the same thing, but archival digging by Word Histories has antedated it: the earliest use found is a simile in the London paper The Referee of 24 November 1878, describing a comedy's jokes as flung together in a heap like a dog's breakfast, with the earliest metaphorical use in The Referee of 16 December 1900, on chaotic heaped-up shop windows, and a March 1901 Boer War letter calling the tinned Maconochie rations a dog's breakfast affair. The companion 'dog's dinner' first meant the same jumble (recorded 1884), then drifted: outfits assembled from miscellaneous bits in the 1920s produced the ironic opposite sense, dressed up like a dog's dinner, by the early 1930s. Word Histories flags every date as the earliest found rather than a definitive first use.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a dog's dinner
- a pig's breakfast
- done up like a dog's dinner
Usage Examples
- The relaunch started well, but the new branding turned the whole website into a dog's breakfast.
- He tried to fix the leak himself, and by evening the kitchen plumbing was a proper dog's breakfast.
- Her revision notes were a dog's breakfast of half-finished sentences and crossed-out diagrams.