maddog

plural maddogs

1. Alternative form of mad dog.
   1. A rabid dog

      Sam Bluegum was bitten by a maddog some days ago.

      1914, Charles Roy Vance, A Book of Letters: Being a Few Sparks Thrown Off in Idle Moments

      2 more examples

      These mad-stones are in our days principally used as a supposed infallible remedy for the bite of maddogs, and naturally every application of such a stone to a dog-bite, even if the latter would have been of itself harmless, is scored as an additional victory for the stone.

      1880, The Louisville Medical News: A Weekly Journal of Medicine and Surgery

      I told Roy Dale and John Wesley the story of the day when I was five years old and a warning about a maddog went out through the neighborhoods.

      1992, Lewis Nordan, Music of the Swamp, →ISBN, page 43

   2. A ferocious fanatic

      As a German, you must remember how the Jewish maddogs took over Berlin.

      1967, Jerome Charyn, Going to Jerusalem: a novel, page 149

      3 more examples

      For Unionism is Americanism ; it is the voice of America's millions of workers who showed the maddogs of the axis that the freedom of man is strong, powerful, and will never perish from the earth.

      1949, American Flint - Volume 38, page 5

      Hijackers and other maddogs often claim higher motives; they did it for the good of the world, they did it for their children.

      1978, Sasha Newborn, First-person intense anthology, →ISBN, page 146

      Either armed black men were coming to kill you, or white maddogs were tearing black children to ragged bits.

      1999, Reynolds Price, Roxanna Slade: A Novel, →ISBN, page 182