Recently I came across a New York Times article by Emily Anthes titled “In Defense of Dumb Dogs.” In the piece, the author reflects on the reaction she received from an earlier article she had written, “Dogs Build Their Vocabularies Like Toddlers,” about dogs that can build surprisingly large vocabularies, with some reportedly learning the names of hundreds of toys.
(A quick heads-up: both of Anthes’s articles linked above are behind the New York Times paywall.)
In that first article, she explored how a small number of dogs are able to learn not only through direct training but also by overhearing conversations about objects and then making the connection on their own. She made it clear this ability was limited to a small number of truly exceptional dogs — going so far as to mention that researchers had searched the world for more dogs like them and turned up only a handful.
Anthes argues that most dogs, by comparison, learn only a handful of words that are meaningful in their daily lives, though she doesn’t really address whether ordinary dogs can pick up words that weren’t directly taught to them.
Many readers were quick to write in claiming their own dogs were just as gifted — describing their pets as “lexical masterminds” with impressive vocabularies of their own. As Anthes points out, that’s unlikely to be true on a broad scale. A 2025 YouGov survey she cites found that two-thirds of dog owners think their dog is smarter than the average dog — which, by definition, can’t be the case for all of us. It is far more likely that we see our own dogs through a more generous lens.
Thinking About My Own Dogs
That idea stuck with me and made me think about the dogs I’ve shared my life with over the years.
I’ve lived with quite a few dogs — some mixed breeds, some purebreds — and like a lot of you reading this, every one of them was, to me, something special. The two I keep coming back to lately are our late English Springer Spaniel and Bella, the poodle/rat terrier mix we adopted from a shelter, who is, at this very moment, snoring at my feet. The more I think about the two of them, the more it strikes me how each one was clever in such a different way.
It turns out the science of dog intelligence agrees — dogs aren’t smart in just one way. Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, has long argued that canine intelligence has three different sides to it: what a breed was originally bred to do, how well a dog solves problems on its own, and how readily a dog learns what we try to teach. (He explains the idea nicely in his Psychology Today piece “Canine Intelligence—Breed Does Matter.”)
I can see this in my own dogs.
Our Springer: a way with words, and a clever streak
Our Springer was, first and foremost, a gun dog through and through. Springer Spaniels were bred to flush and retrieve game, and she came pre-installed with the drive to do it. That fetch obsession was the engine that ran her whole personality — and I’m convinced it’s a big part of why she was so motivated to figure out what we were saying. If understanding “closer” or “bring it” got her another throw, she was paying attention.
By the time she was a few years old, I’d estimate she had a working vocabulary of around a hundred words — and not just nouns like ball or Frisbee. She also picked up relational words like closer, other one, and bring it. We never sat down to formally train her on any of it. She just seemed to absorb it from being part of our daily life. If we said “go bring me your ball” while we were sitting in the living room, she’d trot off and come back with one, hopping that a game of fetch would ensue.
There’s been some interesting research into how dogs learn words. You may have heard of Chaser, a Border Collie who worked for years with retired psychology professor John W. Pilley. Their 2011 research paper documented that Chaser had learned the names of 1,022 individual objects, and Pilley’s research partner Alliston Reid summed up the takeaway by saying that “dogs, like children, can develop extensive vocabularies.” Our Springer didn’t reach four-digit territory, but she clearly understood that words pointed to specific things, and that has to count for something.
Her Clever Streak
But the part of her brain that always surprised me most was her problem-solving side. When she was just four months old, we kept finding her wandering the house when we’d left her crated, which was a mystery to us for several days. I finally figured it out by pretending to leave one afternoon and quietly watching her from another room. There she was, using her small mouth to wiggle the crate door up and down until the locking mechanism loosened, then carefully lifting the gate hook out of the latch with her muzzle. She’d worked the whole thing out by trial and error, at four months old.
That problem-solving streak stayed with her all her life. As an adult, it showed up most reliably during Frisbee. She had a fetch drive that wanted to play forever, and she loved catching them in mid-air. But as she got tired toward the end of a session, a curious habit started showing up. Instead of bringing the Frisbee all the way back, she’d drop it about three feet short and then sprint back to her starting spot, eager for the next throw.
The first few times this happened, we walked over to pick it up — until we realized she had quietly trained us. So we started shaking our heads, pointing at the Frisbee, and saying “no, bring it,” motioning all the way back to our feet. Her first response was usually to nudge it forward maybe a foot and then look at us hopefully, as if to say that’s close enough, can you please throw it now? It didn’t take her long to figure out that the deal was the deal.
She never quite gave up trying, though. We learned to read that cheating phase as her way of telling us she was tired, because she would never stop on her own. Looking back, I think she really did hit all three of Coren’s categories — her breeding gave her the drive, her problem-solving brain figured out the crate and the cheating routine, and her listening and watching built up that little vocabulary of hers.
Bella: her own kind of clever
Bella isn’t the same kind of dog as our Springer, but I wouldn’t say they’re opposites either. They each just had their own personality and their own things they cared about. The terrier side of Bella gives her an independent streak, and she picked up hand signals long before she picked up spoken words. Her formal vocabulary is much smaller than the Springer’s — toy, release, go to bed, a handful of others. If she’s not in the mood, she gives you the look that says I heard you, I’m choosing my not to listen right now.
She also has zero interest in fetching a toy over and over. Her game is the reverse: she wants us to chase her. She’ll grab something, prance away, and if we stop, she’ll throw in a sharp little bark and a wagging tail to egg us back into it. That, to her, is the good stuff.
A careful listner
What she does have, in spades, is an uncanny ability to listen and understand.
The classic example is one a lot of dog owners will recognize. We noticed early on that words like walk and dog would set her off, so we started spelling them. That worked for a little while. Then, somehow, without any deliberate training on our part, she figured out what we meant by the spelled-out versions, too.
The moment that really got me happened just the other day. My husband and I were walking her, and she was being a bit of a handful — pulling on the leash, then stopping abruptly, then pulling again. To deal with this behavior, we had her on a short leash, walking right between the two of us, until she finally settled into a nicer pace. After a few minutes of good walking, my husband turned to me — not to her — and said, “Okay, let’s let her smell now.” That phrase, in our house, is just shorthand for switching her to the curbside so she can investigate the messages other dogs have left behind. Before either of us moved, before the leash even loosened, Bella was already pulling toward the curb.
She had figured out the whole sentence, just from listening.
It turns out that’s exactly the kind of thing researchers have been finding lately. A team in Budapest at Eötvös Loránd University, led by Shany Dror and Claudia Fugazza, has been studying so-called “Gifted Word Learner” dogs — exceptional (and rare) individuals who pick up the names of objects with very little direct teaching. Their most recent work, the subject of Anthes’s January article, showed that some of these dogs can learn new words just by overhearing their owners talk about a toy. You can read more about it on the Family Dog Project’s Gifted Dogs page.
I’m not claiming Bella is in that elite group — she most likely isn’t. But the underlying idea, that a dog who is tuned in to her people will pick up the words that matter to her, fits her perfectly. She isn’t a vocabulary champion. She’s a careful listener, and she figures things out on her own time.
Every dog has something
Which brings me back to all those readers who wrote in to Anthes, swearing that their own dogs were geniuses too. She’s right that statistically, we can’t all be correct about that — somebody’s dog has to be average. But I don’t think most of those readers were wrong about a softer claim: that their dog has a particular kind of cleverness worth bragging about.
Dogs are smart in different ways, shaped by what they were bred for, who they live with, and what they care about. A retrieving breed living with Frisbee-throwing humans is going to develop different skills than a companion breed learning the daily routine of her household. The trick, maybe, is to notice the talents your dog actually has, rather than measuring her against the next Border Collie on YouTube.
So now I’d love to hear about yours. What’s your dog’s particular kind of smart?
Has she figured out a word she had no business knowing? Has he trained you when you weren’t looking? Drop your story in the comments — I have a feeling I’m not the only one with a tale or two to tell.