Dog ate homework image

"The dog ate my homework" (or "My dog ate my homework") is an English expression which carries the suggestion of being a common, poorly fabricated excuse made by schoolchildren to explain their failure to turn in an assignment on time.

The earliest known variation on the idea that written work might be adversely affected by the tendency of some dogs to chew on paper came in a 1905 issue of The Cambrian, a magazine for Welsh Americans. William ApMadoc, the journal's music critic, related an anecdote about a minister temporarily filling in at a country church in Wales.

Two years later Eugene Kennedy described Richard Nixon as "working on the greatest American excuse since 'the dog ate my homework ' " in the Watergate tapes, and the following year John R. Powers had a character in his novel The Unoriginal Sinner and the Ice-Cream God reminisce about having used that excuse as a student.

Lexicographer Barry Popik, who called it "the classic lame excuse that a student makes to a teacher to cover for missing homework", found citations in print increasing from 1976. During the next decade, personal computers became more common in American households and schools, and many students began writing papers with word processors.