Is a dachshund German or Dutch?

Updated 8 October 2026 · 4 min read · Wiener Club

German. The name is German and says what the dog was for: *Dachs* is badger, *Hund* is dog. A badger dog.

The Dutch idea comes from the word teckel, which is what Dutch and Flemish speakers call the breed — and confusingly also a name used in Germany itself, alongside *Dackel*. The Netherlands has a lot of teckels and a strong hunting-teckel tradition, but the breed was developed by German foresters and hunters.

How old is it? Dogs used for badger work are described earlier, but the first clear references to the dachshund as a type — under names like *Tachs Kriecher*, badger crawler — come from the early 1700s, and German breeders standardised the type through the 18th century.

What the names mean

Dachshund — German, literally badger dog. The word used in English and in the breed standard.
Dackel — the everyday German word, and the one you will hear in Germany.
Teckel — the Dutch and Flemish word, also used in German for the hunting-bred lines. This is where "is it Dutch?" comes from.
Sausage dog, wiener dog, worshond, saucisse — what everyone else actually says.

Why the shape

Every odd thing about a dachshund is a job description. Short legs and a long body to get down a badger sett and work in a tunnel. A deep chest for lung capacity underground. Loose skin that does not tear when a dog reverses out of a tight hole. Big paws that turn out slightly, for digging. A loud, carrying bark so a hunter above ground can hear where the dog is.

And the temperament people call stubborn: a dog that worked alone, out of sight, against an animal that fights back, had to make its own decisions. A biddable dachshund would have been a dead dachshund. That is what you are living with on the lead.

Where the varieties came from

The smooth coat came first. The long-haired and wire-haired versions were developed later, with spaniel and terrier input, for working in water, cold and thorny cover.
The standard size is the original — built for badger. The miniature was bred down to go after rabbits, in narrower holes.
Germany also recognises a third, smaller size, the *Kaninchenteckel* — the rabbit teckel — measured by chest circumference rather than weight.

How it became a pet

By the nineteenth century the dachshund was a court favourite as well as a working dog, and it travelled: Queen Victoria kept them, which did for the breed in Britain what a royal endorsement usually does. The breed suffered in Britain and the US during both world wars for the obvious reason, and recovered each time.

The working lines never went away. In Germany and the Netherlands, teckels still do real hunting work, which is why a dog bred from those lines may arrive with rather more opinion about hedges than you expected.

And the first Olympic mascot

Waldi, the official mascot of the 1972 Munich Olympics, was a long-haired dachshund — the first official Olympic mascot of any Summer Games. The marathon route that year was laid out roughly in the shape of a dachshund.

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