On the Paronomasic Propensities of Computer Scientists
DAWG is also an acronym for Directed Acyclic Word Graph. It was coined by Andrew Appel and Guy Jacobson
in their seminal paper on computer-based Scrabble, "The World's Fastest Scrabble Program". There was of course no need for a new acronym as the more generic form "Directed Acyclic Graph" (or DAG) would have sufficed quite nicely - but if they had used that, their tree-walking procedure could never have been described as Walking the Dawg...