Faith: God, too, is what you might call an 'infracaninophile'

Infracaninophile.

The word above, friends, is indeed an actual word.

By the time you finish reading the other words I’m hoping to line up here, my additional hope is that you might have some idea as to what it means and how to use it. But I confess that my deeper hope and confident belief is that you will also have enough good sense not to use it.

I can only imagine how impressed folks down at the coffee shop, the waiting room, or the teachers’ lounge would be should someone choose to nonchalantly drop such a word into casual conversation.

I say “impressed,” but I do not say “favorably” impressed.

So, you might ask, where did you get that word? What impressed you about it?

The simple answer is that I got it via the free “Word of the Day” emails sent to subscribers by the folks at Word Genius (wordgenius.com). What impressed me about the word is that it looks and sounds even stranger than their usual daily offerings (which are often strange and unusual), and I found this one oddly appealing.

It’s interestingly long and, particularly if you were blessed with a good background in phonics, you’ll likely find that it has an interesting taste in your mouth as you roll it around on your tongue and experiment with its pronunciation.

The folks at the website I’ve mentioned are kind enough to provide with each day’s word a wealth of information regarding definitions, pronunciations, and backgrounds. You can probably look the word over and come up with some guesses of your own, but they explain that “infra-” has to do with being “underneath.” “Canin” refers to the Latin “caninus” for “dog.” And “-phile” is a suffix from Greek, “meaning ‘dear’ or ‘beloved.’”

So, they define an “infracaninophile” as “a person who loves or admires underdogs.” (The downtrodden fans of perennially losing teams come to mind.)

Again, according to the folks at Word Genius, the word was coined “in the first half of the 20th century” by Christopher Morley in his preface to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Morley created the word, they say, and used it to describe Holmes as always being “the infracaninophile —the helper of the underdog.” They write that “underdog” was “a recent American invention” and that Morley “saw the humor of rephrasing a modern slang word in ancient-sounding Latin.”

Well, it really is a cool-sounding word with a rather interesting pedigree. As words go, maybe there’s something oddly fitting about a word referring to “lovers of underdogs” coming out on top at least on one day in its own featured article.

I don’t plan to work “infracaninophile” into any sermons, and I’d be surprised if any theologian or Bible commentator has ever decided to put the word to use. But take a look at the Christ we see in the Gospels healing the hurting, cherishing the poor, delighting in children, touching the untouchable, saving the lost. And don’t fail to ponder his words when he says that in God’s kingdom “the last will be first” (Matthew 20:16).

Infracaninophile? Oh, yes! The Greatest of All loves “the least of these” with the greatest of all loves. 

Curtis Shelburne writes about faith for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him at:

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