Chinese Zodiac

Year of the Dog 狗

Loyal, fair-minded, and a reliable read on people.

The Dog runs on loyalty and a strong sense of right and wrong. People born in Dog years tend to be honest, protective, and quietly principled — slow to give trust, but steadfast once they do, and hard to fool about someone's character.

Years of the Dog

Recent and upcoming Dog years are 1982, 1994, 2006, 2018, 2030, 2042. One catch worth knowing: the Chinese zodiac year doesn't begin on January 1st — it starts at the lunar new year, in late January or February. If you were born in January or early February, check the exact cutoff for your year before you count yourself a Dog.

Dog personality

Faithful, fair, and dependable. A Dog is the one who stays when things get hard and calls out what isn't just.

Vigilance can turn to anxiety or cynicism — a Dog may expect the worst of a situation, and guard so carefully that it struggles to relax into trust.

Dog compatibility

Dog is steady with the bold Tiger and free-running Horse, who share its principles. The clash with Dragon, its opposite, is skepticism meeting grand certainty.

In the zodiac's structure, the Dog sits in a trine group (三合) with Tiger and Horse — signs that tend to share its pace — and directly opposite Dragon, its clash pair (六冲). A clash isn't a verdict, though: it usually means two people reaching the same goal by opposite routes.

Beyond the year

Your animal sign comes from your birth year alone — the coarsest layer of a Chinese chart. Its fixed element is Earth, but a full BaZi (八字) reading adds your month, day, and hour, which is where most of your actual character shows up. Two Dog people born years apart can be very different once the rest of the chart is drawn.