etymology of "sic 'em"?

April 16, 2015 11:33 PM

When you tell your dog to go attack somebody, we say "Sic 'em!" Anybody know the word origin of this phrase?
posted by Opengreen to Human Relations (3 answers total)

I looked this up once and I believe sic is a dialectal variant or corruption of "seek".
posted by lollusc at 11:42 PM on April 16, 2015 [6 favorites]

Etymonline is usually good for this sort of thing, and they come through on this one, too. Searching sic, verb, it says to see sick, which gives us this:

"to chase, set upon" (as in command sick him!), 1845, dialectal variant of seek. Used as an imperative to incite a dog to attack a person or animal; hence "cause to pursue."

posted by MeghanC at 11:43 PM on April 16, 2015 [5 favorites]

This will make even more sense when one considers that the "long" vowel form of the short 'i' sound, phonetically (not in stupid English unphonetic conventions) is the "ee" sound.
posted by IAmBroom at 5:33 PM on April 18, 2015