There are White and black dogs [duplicate]

Question

You have two dogs which are black and white, two white dogs, and two black dogs. Have the following sentences correctly distinghsed them?

You'd need to start any non-confusing structure with, "You have 6 dogs… otherwise it just becomes a maths puzzle — DoneWithThis., Commented Jun 19, 2015 at 9:52
alternatively, you could possibly refer to 'black & white' dogs as piebald [though that is usually reserved for horses]. Note that 'black & white' as a colour-pair is rarely referred to as 'white & black' even if white is the predominant colour. Wikipedia tells me you can use piebald for dogs — DoneWithThis., Commented Jun 19, 2015 at 9:56
@Pazzo I don't agree that it's a dup of that question. The OP here seems to like to differentiate other concepts. — M.A.R., Commented Jun 19, 2015 at 15:32

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-13 12:55:13Z

To me, your sentence would imply that there are dogs that are white, and dogs that are black, but to be unambiguous about this, I would say:

There are white dogs and black dogs.

For the two colour dogs, I would say:

There are black and white dogs.

Note that black comes first when describing the colour pairing. This is still a bit ambiguous, so you could make it clearer by hyphenating.

There are black-and-white dogs.

To describe all the dogs at once, I would say either of these:

There are black dogs, white dogs, and black and white dogs.

There are black, white, and black and white dogs.

As part of a list like this, black and white loses its ambiguity.

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