Where did then word Great Dane come from?

Answer 1

It is a name once coined in one of his works by Georges-Louis de Buffon, an eighteenth-century naturalist for a type of big hunting dog fashionable at the time. But the breed now called the Great Dane never had any connexion with that dog, nor with Denmark, nor was it ever called "Great Dane" by anyone else. The breed has its roots in a hunting dog called in Germany the "Englische Dogge" and when German nobles became the main breeders in the 17th century it became known as the "German Dog" or 'German boarhound'..

In the course of the 19th century, Germany became increasingly unpopular for its aggressive and expansionist policies and the breeders of the dog found after 1870 that its name was hurting sales. One of them remembered that a more or less similar dog once had been named "Grand Danois" ('Great Dane') by De Buffon and liked the sound of it. So did the other breeders, and the dog was from then on bred and sold under that name. But despite its name, the dog is and remains a purely German breed.