The Origin of the Word “Dude”

 From The Art of Manliness:

Thanks to tireless research by two etymologists, we know the exact date the word dude was coined. Robert Sale Hill published a poem in The New York World on January 14, 1883, describing a type of foppish young man living in cities. These young men were overly fastidious about their clothing, professed an interest in avant-garde art, and smoked tiny cigarettes. They were the 19th-century version of the 21st-century hipster. And like the hipsters of the 2010s, the dandies of the 1880s were a trope that the public loved to lampoon.

In the poem that Robert Sale Hill published, he called these fops “dudes.” Etymologists Barry Popik and Gerald Cohen theorize that Hill derived the word “dude” from “doodle,” as in “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The original New England Yankee Doodle, Cohen notes, “was the country bumpkin who stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni; i.e., by sticking a feather in his cap, he imagined himself to be fashionable like the young men of his day known as ‘macaronis.'” (Read more.)