Proverb: Elke hond kry sy dag

Four short words, and every one of them earns its place. This well-loved proverb teaches the quantifier elke, the everyday verb kry, and the possessive sy — and it hides one rule that catches almost every English-speaking beginner. Let us read it closely.

The proverb

Literal meaning: every dog gets its day. The English equivalent is identical: every dog has its day.

Figurative meaning: everyone gets their moment — their stroke of luck, their turn to shine, or (sometimes) their comeuppance. It is encouragement for the underdog ("don't give up, your day will come") and, more wryly, a comment when someone finally gets what they had coming. Afrikaans speakers use it both ways, and the context tells you which.

Word-by-word breakdown

elke — and the rule that catches everyone

Here is the single most important lesson on this page. Elke means "every" or "each," and it has one unbreakable demand: it must be followed by a singular noun. You say elke hond (every dog), never elke honde. Even though the meaning is clearly about all the dogs in the world, the noun stays stubbornly singular.

This trips up English speakers less than you might think — because English does exactly the same thing. We say "every dog," "each child," "every house," never "every dogs." The logic is shared: elke (like "every") picks out the members of a group one at a time, so it grammatically zooms in on a single representative. You are not talking about the pack; you are talking about each dog, individually, one after another. That singular framing is baked into the word.

So treat elke as a switch that forces singular, every time:

The wider family of quantity words — baie, al, party, sommige, elke — is covered at quantifiers.

kry — the everyday verb "to get"

The verb is kry (to get, to receive). It is one of the workhorses of Afrikaans, and a lovely one for beginners because it is short and barely changes. In the proverb it is plain present tense: kry. The same form covers I get, you get, the dog gets — Afrikaans verbs do not change endings for person or number, so kry is kry no matter who the subject is. (Its past tense is gekry: Elke hond het sy dag gekry — but the proverb stays in the present, for reasons we will see in a moment.)

sy — the possessive determiner

The little word sy before dag is the possessive determiner: its / his. Elke hond kry sy dag means each dog gets its own day. Two things to know about sy:

First, it does double duty. Standing before a noun, as here, it is the possessive his / its (sy dag = its day). Standing on its own as a subject, the same letters mean she (Sy kom môre = she is coming tomorrow). Position tells them apart — before a noun, it is the possessive. You can see the full set at possessive determiners.

Second, once the possessive is in place, there is no article: it is sy dag, not die sy dag — just as English says "its day," never "the its day." The possessive already does the job the article would do.

The generic present — a truth with no clock

Why is the proverb in the present tense — kry, not het gekry? Because it states a generic truth: something true in general, for any dog, at no particular moment. The present tense lifts the saying out of time, exactly as the English "every dog has its day" does. Put it in the past — Elke hond het sy dag gekry — and you would be describing one finished event, a little story about specific dogs on specific days, rather than a law of life. The timeless present is what turns a sentence into a proverb.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• The proverb means everyone gets their moment — encouragement to the underdog, or a wry note when someone gets their due.
• elke ("every / each") obligatorily takes a singular noun: elke hond, never elke honde — see quantifiers.
• kry ("get") never changes ending for person or number — I get, the dog gets are both kry.
• sy before a noun is the possessive its / his, and it pushes out the article: sy dag, not die sy dag — see possessive determiners.
• The generic present keeps the saying timeless; the past would shrink it to a single story.