Dogged behaviour means you keep going, even when the work is slow, boring, or hard, and you will not give up. It is determination with a bit of stubbornness in it — more grind than flash. We often praise it: dogged courage, a dogged campaign. Though actually the feeling is not always warm; dogged can also hint that someone is too stubborn, chewing on a problem the way a dog will not drop a bone. Say it with two beats, DOG-id. That is different from the past of the verb to dog (to follow someone closely), which looks the same on the page but is usually one beat. The adjective comes from the old idea that a dog has that clinging character, dog + -ed. Older English could also use dogged in a nastier way, “like a snarling dog,” but learners almost always meet the “will not quit” sense.