Dog Chinese Zodiac: Years, Elements and Compatibility

The short answer

The Dog is the eleventh of the twelve Chinese zodiac animals — 戌, the branch that runs from 19:00 to 21:00. Its years are 1922, 1934, 1946, 1958, 1970, 1982, 1994, 2006, 2018, 2030 and 2042. It clashes with the Dragon, harms the Rooster, and punishes the Ox and the Goat — seven named relations in all, more than any other branch carries.

If your birth year is not on that list, the Chinese zodiac calculator will place it, and will tell you which of the five element forms your Dog year took.

The rest of this page works through the seven relations one at a time, and names the pairings where the punishment actually lands.

The 1982 Dog year specifically — two year-edges ten days apart — has its own page.

The branch that touches seven others

The Dog is the eleventh of the twelve branches. In the classical relationship table that sits behind the 144-pair chart, five rules can name a second branch for any given branch, and each one hands over a fixed set: the Six Harmony pairs a branch with one partner, the Three Harmony gives it two, and the clash, the harm and the punishment supply the rest. Tally the distinct partners and eleven of the twelve branches fall into a narrow band — seven of them come to five, and four come to six.

One of the twelve comes to seven.

That branch is 戌, and the count is arithmetic rather than doctrine: it is what you get by walking the ring and applying the five rules to every pair, and the same walk is what fills the four hundred and forty-four cells of the pairing chart, which is why the chart and this table cannot disagree. The Dog's position in the table is not that it has one famous pairing and some others. It is that it is the densest cell there is — and the rest of this page works through what fills it.

Dog Compatibility: Three Allies and Four Conflicts

The seven partners split cleanly, and the split is the useful part.

• Six Harmony: Rabbit
• Three Harmony: Tiger, Horse
• Clash: Dragon
• Harm: Rooster
• Punishment: Ox, Goat
• Self-punishment: none

Three of the seven are on the Dog's side: the Rabbit through the Six Harmony, and the Tiger and the Horse through the Three Harmony, which is the fire frame with the Dog as its last member. The other four are not: the Dragon clashes with it, the Rooster harms it, and the Ox and the Goat each punish it. Four conflicts is again a maximum, and again it belongs to one branch only — every other branch has three or fewer, and four of the twelve have just two.

One absence is worth naming because readers notice it. Four branches punish themselves, and the Dog is not one of them; the four that do are 辰, 午, 酉 and 亥, which are the Dragon, the Horse, the Rooster and the Pig. So the Dog's row is missing nothing on that account — but it is also the row that collects the most from every other rule.

There is a second pattern inside the four conflicts, and it involves the Dog's own neighbours in the element column. The four earth branches are 辰, 戌, 丑 and 未, and the chapter on the Three Harmonies has a sentence about them as a group: the four elemental frames leave earth out, it says, and if all four earth branches are present they form a frame of their own. On the Dog's line, that grouping does not survive contact with the rest of the table. The Dragon clashes with it, the Ox and the Goat punish it, and none of the three is a partner on the Dog's side; 戌 is the only one of the four that stands in a named relation to all three of the others, and in its case every one of them is a conflict. This page drew that from the rules rather than from any book that says it, and the last section says what that is worth.

Where the Dog keeps the fire

Every branch carries heavenly stems underneath it, and the almanac page that lists them gives 戌 three: 戊 earth as the principal stem, then 辛 metal and 丁 fire. The weights it prints are twelve, five and three. That ordering is one of the few places in this material where the answer is not in dispute, because the same three stems turn up under the Dog from several directions.

The most explicit is the Ming compendium's chapter on the month's ruling element, which parcels a month out day by day instead of listing what a branch holds. Its entry for the ninth month reads 九月建戌，戌中有辛金用事七日，丙火墓庫五日，戊土一十八日 — seven days, five days and eighteen days, which is the whole month. The phrase to keep is the middle one: 丙火墓庫, the storage of fire. The same chapter then does it for all four earth branches at once, naming 壬水墓庫 for 辰, 甲木墓庫 for 未, 丙火墓庫 for 戌 and 庚金墓庫 for 丑. The almanac page states the same conclusion from the other end, describing 戌 as the grave of fire and of earth, and calling what it holds the fire storehouse. A third passage uses the idea without explaining it: the chapter on the six harms, in the middle of a sentence about the Rooster, refers to 戌 simply as dead fire.

So the Dog's cell is where fire is put away — that much is agreed. What is not agreed is which fire. The almanac's hidden-stem verse runs 戌藏辛金及丁戊, which puts 丁 in the storehouse; the Ming chapter's day-by-day roster puts 丙 there. Both are lists of what 戌 holds, so this is not one source describing the whole and another describing a rotation. It is a flat disagreement over the fire stem, and this site's own engine follows the almanac and 丁. The Rat page found the same fork on the water side, where the two readings are easier to reconcile, and handles the general case there.

The clash is the one the book tells you to want

The Dog's clash is with the Dragon, and the chapter on clashes begins by defining what a clash is: seven positions round the ring, which is why the two are counted as opposed rather than merely distant.

What the same chapter says next is the reason this section is here. Having defined the clash, it makes an exception for exactly four branches: what the four storehouses hold — 辰, 戌, 丑 and 未 — is the wealth, the office and the seal of a chart, and those four 尤喜衝激, which is to say they welcome being struck. The stored things are what a chart wants opened, so for these four the clash is the mechanism rather than the damage.

That cuts both ways for a Dog. It means the Dragon is not simply the animal to avoid, which is the reading most pairing tables leave you with, and it means the folk summary of a clash does not carry here in the form people usually meet it. It also does not make the Dragon an ally: the rule says the contents of the storehouse welcome the strike, not that the two branches get along. The Dog's own Dragon page reads the same pair from the other end, as the chapter on animals is written for the animal that was never a real one in the first place.

The harm runs one way only

The Dog's harm is with the Rooster, and the chapter on harms writes this pair as directional, in a single sentence: 酉戌相害者，謂戌以死火害酉旺金，此嫉妒相害，故酉人見戌則凶，戌人見酉無災. The Rooster meeting the Dog is a problem; the Dog meeting the Rooster is not. Half the chapter's other pairs are written the same way and half are not, and this page reports the asymmetry without adopting the verdict that comes with it.

The chapter also gives the machinery, and the machinery is more interesting than the verdict. A harm, it says, happens when the branch you are afraid of gets combined away by a third party: you fear being clashed, and someone else is holding the branch that does the clashing. It runs through the pairs, and on the Rooster's line it says the Rooster fears the Rabbit's clash, and the Dog is what combines with the Rabbit. So the Dog is not the Rooster's enemy in this account — it is the branch whose presence frees the Rabbit to do the clashing. This is the one place where the page departs from a literal reading of its source: the printed text writes 戊 where the sentence requires 戌, and the pattern of the four preceding clauses leaves no doubt which character belongs there.

Read together with the previous section, the two chapters describe the Dog's most discussed relationships in ways that will not be familiar from a pairing table: the clash is the one you are told to welcome, and the harm is the one that only hurts when it runs one way.

The punishment names two Dog years and passes over the rest

The Dog's last two conflicts are with the Ox and the Goat, and they come from the punishment chapter, which derives the set rather than listing it: 丑順至戌，戌順至未，極十數而為恃勢之刑 — count round the ring to ten and you get the three, and the chapter names them the punishment of relying on power. It then explains why: one member's stored influence is used against another's, the Ox's water against the Dog's fire. It also rules on the group the Dog belongs to. Among the four earth branches, it says, only three punish one another and 辰 is left out: 辰戌丑未有戌丑未互相刑，內有辰無刑.

The chapter's most concrete passage, and the reason this section exists, works through the Dog years one at a time. The Dog can carry only the five yang stems, and the chapter takes them in turn under the heading of the Ox punishing the Dog, giving each its own verdict.

• 甲戌 (1934, 1994) — named outright as a punishing pair
• 丙戌 (1946, 2006) — passed over — a generating pair, so not counted as a punishment
• 戊戌 (1958, 2018) — named outright as a punishing pair
• 庚戌 (1970, 2030) — named in the chapter's example as a same-kind punishment, not favourable
• 壬戌 (1922, 1982, 2042) — passed over — a generating pair, so not counted as a punishment

Two of the five are named as punishing pairs and one appears only in the chapter's illustration; the remaining two are set aside because the pairing generates rather than crosses. In the eleven years this page covers, that is four of them: 1934 and 1994 for the first named stem, 1958 and 2018 for the second. This page reports which years the chapter singles out and does not adopt the judgment attached to them. What is worth keeping is that the material is specific enough to be looked up: a Dog born in 2018 and a Dog born in 2030 fall on opposite sides of the chapter's line, and the chapter says so.

Seven in the evening to nine, and the ninth month

The Dog holds the nineteenth and twentieth hours of the traditional day. 戌时 runs from 19:00 to 21:00, and China's science popularisation platform, which is run by the China Association for Science and Technology, describes the hour as the sun already sunk behind the hills with the light going dim, and quotes Ouyang Xiu for it. The reason the branch takes the dog is behavioural rather than calendrical, and a county government museum page in Gansu gives it in one line: the dog is at its most alert guarding the house overnight, so the hour belongs to the dog. The pairing itself is older than the reasoning and is written out in the compendium's chapter on the animals, where the Dog takes its place as one of the six odd-toed creatures.

The Dog's other seat is the month. The months are numbered from the Tiger, so the first is 寅 and the ninth is 戌, and that is why the chapter that parcels out the Dog's hidden stems opens its entry with 九月建戌 — the ninth month is built on the Dog. The same source places that month at the turn of autumn, and the ninth month is the one the almanac and the county page both call the harvest month. The Tiger page reads the branch that opens the year, which is the parent of the month order used here.

Neither the hour nor the month is a statement about a person. 戌 is the eleventh of the twelve double-hours and the ninth of the twelve months, and both numbers fall out of the ring. This page does not turn either into a claim about anyone.

Eleven Dog years, and three of the five forms have a record

Dog years arrive every twelve years. Between 1922 and 2042 there are eleven of them.

The last column is the one that separates this page from a list of dates. This site has surveyed its own search suggestion data once, and the survey knows three of the Dog's five element forms: water dog, wood dog and metal dog were all typed by somebody. Earth dog and fire dog can be computed for every year in the table above and never appeared. That is a statement about this site's records and not about the world — a form with no record is a form nobody in those records asked for, which is a weaker and more honest claim than saying the form does not exist.

The forms are unevenly spread across the window for a reason worth stating. Water appears three times and the other four appear twice, and the window itself is why: this page chose 1922 to 2042, and both ends of that span are 壬戌, so the water dog sits at either end and in the middle. A window chosen differently would give a different column. The arithmetic behind the table is not a choice, though: twelve years pass between one Dog and the next and a stem cycle is ten, so each step advances the stem by two, and because 戌 is one of the six yang branches it can only carry the five yang stems — which is exactly the five forms above, in the generating order of the elements.

A Dog year has two start lines, and in 2030 they almost meet

Where a Dog year begins is two questions, and China's calendar standard settles the more official one. GB/T 33661-2017, drafted by the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and in force since September 2017, fixes how the lunar year is named and puts the animal's year at the first lunar month: its rule is that the span from the first day of the first month to the last day of the twelfth is the animal's year. On the standard's reading, the animal changes on Lunar New Year's Day.

Chart reading draws the line somewhere else, at Li Chun, the solar term that opens spring and falls on 3, 4 or 5 February. The two lines are usually described as being a week or two apart, and two Dog years from the Hong Kong Observatory's published conversion tables show how little that description holds. In 1982 the observatory puts Spring Commences on 4 February and the first lunar month on 25 January: ten days apart, lunar first. In 2030 the same two lines fall on 4 February and 3 February: one day apart, and this time Li Chun arrives second, so that the lunar year has already begun when spring opens. The observatory's tables head both of those years with the same phrase this page uses, year of the Dog, which is what makes the comparison a like-for-like one rather than a translation of terms.

The two lines are not rival answers to one question — one is the state's rule for naming a year, the other is the convention this site's charts use — but the gap between them is not a constant either, and a birthday near the end of January or the start of February is decided by which line is read. How this site handles sources sets out the rest, including the difference between a text the page is quoting and a conclusion the page is drawing itself.

Where this page can be wrong

Five places, stated plainly.

The counts come first, because the whole page rests on them. The seven and the four are counts of this site's own relationship table, computed by walking the ring; a different school that splits or renames one of the five rules would produce different numbers, and the pairing chart would move with it. What the counts do not depend on is doctrine — they are arithmetic on a fixed twelve-member ring, and anyone can redo them.

The two derived claims come second. That the Dog is the only branch with seven partners, that it is the only one with four conflicts, and that it is the only one of the four earth branches related to all three of the others, are three facts this page worked out rather than read. The rules they are computed from are classical; the sentences themselves are this page's, and no source quoted here states them.

The verdicts come third, and they are the ones most likely to travel further than they should. The punishment chapter's two named Dog years, the harm chapter's one-way sentence, the clash chapter's welcome for the four storehouses — all three are reported here because they are concrete and checkable, and none of them is adopted. They are one Ming author's readings of a chart, and this page does not repeat them as its own.

The hidden stems come fourth, and this is the one place where the sources are simply in disagreement. The almanac puts 丁 fire under the Dog and the Ming chapter puts 丙 there, and both are lists of what the branch holds rather than answers to different questions. This site's engine follows the almanac. If a chart you have seen puts the other stem under 戌, that is why.

The dates come last, along with one reading of the text. The window 1922 to 2042 is a choice this page made, and the water dog appears three times in it because of that choice; the 2030 example was picked because the two start lines nearly coincide that year, which makes it the widest possible contrast with 1982 rather than a typical case. And the sentence in the harm chapter about the Rooster is printed with 戊 where it needs 戌; this page reads it as 戌 on the strength of the four clauses before it, and says so here rather than in a footnote.