I use dude alot in spoken life usually as a gender neutral term similer to you or sometimes person. Anyway I realized I had never read Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Well so I was reading it and he used dude refering to a group of people (that he did not like from the sound of it). Now it gets interesting. While I take a break to let my head recover from reading old english. What is the origins and history of dude?
Buy me a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary for Christmas, and I’ll tell you.
No, really. That’s the resource you need. It has word histories for everything, and you should find a copy in your Friendly Neighborhood Public Library.
The origin of dude is unknown, but here’s a little history.
In early American English, “dude” was synonymous with “dandy,” ie; a man who is overly-concerned with dress and appearance, and clueless with regard to practical matters. My WAG at etymology would be that it is derived from “duds,” (articles of clothing,) which goes back to the 1400s.
After being applied derisively to Easterners for quite some time, the negative connotations dropped away. (Some time after people started calling quaint Western vacation destinations “Dude Ranches.”)
People started calling smart dressers “dudes” without a trace of irony. From there, it became a general term meaning someone who’s cool.
From the turn-of-the-century Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:
(I guess my WAG wasn’t that far off.)
Dude that page contained alot of dudage, seriously.
Funny how words change over time like that. This is going to make for some funney images in my mind when I’m talking to people for awhile.