mastiff: [14] Despite its rather fierce reputation, a mastiff may etymologically be a ‘tamed’ dog, a dog ‘accustomed to the hand’. The word seems to have come into the language as an alteration of Old French mastin, which was a descendant of the Vulgar Latin *mānsuētīnus ‘tame’. This in turn went back to Latin mānsuūtus, a compound adjective based on manus ‘hand’ and suēscere ‘accustom’. => manual
