What the word names now
A wolfhound is a very large dog of a type once used to hunt wolves or to keep them away from livestock. In current English the word mostly labels a handful of recognized breeds, especially the Irish wolfhound. Older British usage also applied it to the Russian wolfhound, a dog now almost always called the borzoi. The work that supplied the name has gone. Wolves were driven out of England by the end of the fifteenth century and out of Scotland by the early eighteenth. Ireland's last recorded wolf was killed in 1786. The dogs outlasted their quarry.
How English put the two parts together
The origin of the word wolfhound is unusually clear. It is a native compound of wolf and hound, not a borrowing from French, Latin, or a Celtic language. Speakers simply set the prey beside the hunting dog. The modern solid spelling, and the hyphenated wolf-hound, belong to the late eighteenth century. Sources do not agree on the first printed date. One standard dictionary gives 1786; another places the word in the decade 1780–90; a third etymological account cites 1799. Those citations are close in time and far from identical. None of them is a medieval text.
Middle English already had wolf-hond, written as two words or as a loose compound, in the early fifteenth century. A glossary from about 1425 uses wolfe hond as an English equivalent of Latin luparius, a dog that pursues the wolf. That is a description of work, not a kennel name. After that early pair, the printed trail thins. In the seventeenth century the usual English term for the same kind of animal was wolf-dog, in use by the 1650s. By 1736 wolf-dog could also mean a cross between a wolf and a dog, so the older functional label had begun to split. German Wolfshund and Dutch wolfshond are built the same way and show the same two readings: a hunter of wolves, and later a dog of wolf-like type.
If the Georgian English noun is a new formation, it was an obvious one. English had long made hunting compounds on hound: bloodhound from about 1300, then foxhound, deerhound, and staghound, with elkhound later still. Wolfhound sits in that series. Commentators who treat the modern word as perhaps a fresh coinage are marking the long gap after the Middle English gloss, not claiming that speakers needed a foreign model.
The older roots of each half
Wolf is inherited. Old English wulf passed into Middle English wolf and then into the modern form. Behind it stands Proto-Germanic *wulfaz and a widespread Indo-European word for the animal, reconstructed as *wĺ̥kʷos. Germanic relatives include German Wolf, Dutch wolf, Old Norse ulfr, and Gothic wulfs. Farther afield are Lithuanian vilkas, Old Church Slavonic vluku, and Sanskrit vṛka-. Greek lykos and Latin lupus are usually placed in the same family, though the exact sound history is less tidy. None of that depth is packed into the compound as a learned hint. The first element is the ordinary English name of the animal.
Hound is inherited as well, but its sense has narrowed. Old English hund meant dog in general, and that is still what German Hund, Dutch hond, Old Norse hundr, and Gothic hunds mean. From the twelfth century English began to restrict hound to a dog used for hunting, while dog, once a more specific and sometimes low word, rose to become the everyday term. By the sixteenth century that swap was largely complete. A wolfhound is therefore not a tautology. It names a hunting dog whose quarry is the wolf, using the specialized later sense of hound.
Both halves are Germanic inheritances. The compound itself is ordinary English morphology: two free words set side by side, stress on the first element, written solid or with a hyphen. There is no prefix, no Latin suffix, and no folk story hiding under the surface.
When the job became a breed
As long as wolves were a practical threat, the name could stay functional. A wolfhound was whatever large hound did the work. Irish writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often preferred wolfdog or Irish greyhound for the tall, greyhound-shaped hunters that circulated as gifts among courts. In 1652 Oliver Cromwell restricted that export, a sign that the stock was already scarce. After 1786 the remaining dogs became status animals rather than working packs.
The late-eighteenth-century English form arrives in that interval, just as the job was ending. In the later nineteenth century Captain George Augustus Graham and others rebuilt a show and kennel type under the name Irish wolfhound, drawing on surviving Irish lines and on Scottish deerhounds, with further crosses recorded in the breeding books. Graham's club and points of the breed date from 1885. The Russian wolfhound entered English a little later as borzoi, from Russian borzoi, swift, recorded in 1887. The older English descriptive name faded as the borrowed breed name took hold.
Sense moved from a hound for wolves to a member of one of a few giant sighthound breeds, some of which no longer hunt anything of the kind. The morphology never changed. What changed is that the first element stopped pointing at live prey in the next field.
A date that will not sit still
The useful reminder is the disagreement over first dates. 1786, the 1780s, and 1799 are close, but they are not the same citation, and none of them is the Middle English gloss. English had the idea, and even the two-word shape, centuries earlier. The compact modern noun is late, and it shared the page with wolf-dog. Speakers did not need a borrowed label. They needed wolves, hounds, and a reason to put the two names together.