Dagwood Bumstead is one of the principal characters in the comic strip Blondie. What’s the origin of his first name? I’m not aware of any real-life people named Dagwood; was this given name ever used before the comic strip was published? If not, does anyone know how Blondie cartoonist Chic Young came up with the name? Is it just meaningless nonsense or does it contain some sort of pun or other oblique reference to 1930s culture that I’m missing?
It looks like it’s a surname that’s a variation on Dagworth.
“Hence, conjecturally, the surname is descended from the tenant of the lands of Dagworth which were occupied by Hugh de Montfort as an under-tenant who was recorded in the Domesday Book census of 1086. Dagworth was a village containing a Mill, 2 Churches, 10 beasts and 40 goats.”
Google tells me:
The name Dagwood is a boy’s name of English origin meaning " shining forest ".
Searching in US transcribed sources I find a handfull, most of which look like transcription errors. There’s one clear Dagwood in the 1940 census, but he must be transcribed differently in previous censuses. And there’s at least one later, that is probably a nickname.
A few of the transcription errors are for Haywood, one is for a female, Norwegian-born Dagmar.
My guess (based on nothing) is that Chic Young saw it as a surname and thought it would make a silly first name. See also: Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve, J. Wellington Wimpy, and Thurston Howell III.
Ah, so this trend of using surnames as given names isn’t as modern as I thought. (I always assumed that it really took off in 1984, when everyone started naming their daughters Madison after the female lead in Splash.) Seems comic book artists have been doing it a lot longer.
Here’s one from 1720:
Grandfather of the philanthropist.
Dagwood Bumstead was the bumbling son of a millionaire, and would have been heir to the Bumstead Locomotive fortune. But then Dagwood met Blondie Boopadoop who was a flapper, and when they got married, Dagwood was disinherited from his family’s fortune.
Blondie Boopadoop’s name is a pretty obvious 1920s flapper reference, with her first name obviously a nickname for blonde hair (probably a ditzy blonde reference) and her last name very similar to Betty Boop and the phrase “boop oop a doop”.
I poked around on google for a bit and didn’t find anything about where exactly Chic Young got the name Dagwood from. I’m assuming that he just wanted something that would sound a bit silly and pretentious, as befitting a 1920s son of a millionaire. The name Bumstead came from Chic Young’s friend Arthur Bumstead. Also, Dagwood’s dog was named after Arthur’s dog, Daisy.
People have been doing it for ages. Franklin Pierce and Franklin Roosevelt both had a last name for a first name, after all.
I looked up my definitive Blondie reference book, and despite a lengthy history of the beginnings of the strip, there was nothing about the origin of “Dagwood”, so there’s probably not much of a backstory there. But your post mentions some of the things I came here to say, and you beat me to it! Yes, Dagwood was the son of the millionaire J. Bolling Bumsteads, of the Bumstead Locomotive Works, and was disinherited when he chose love over money and married the then flapper Blondie Boopadoop. She was originally portrayed as a gold-digging flapper, but things quickly transformed into a wholesome family household.
The only other thing I can add regarding names is that when the second child came along in 1941, the name “Cookie” was the result of a reader contest in which King Features was swamped with 431,275 name suggestions. So that one didn’t come from Chic Young at all.
The closest I can come was a girl named Dagmar when I was a little kid.
You should ask his mother-in-law…Eudora.
Browsing through newspaper archives, I found dozens of articles explaining the origin of the “dogwood” tree throughout the 1920s. They all vary in some detail, but basically the name comes from Britain. The wood of the tree is very hard and polishes nicely to a fine point. That made it fit for skewers, also called “dags.” The tree became known as the daggerwood, shortened to dagwood, and shifted to the modern dogwood. Chic Young had plenty of opportunity to see these articles and might have noted the unusual term.
I only found one reference to a name of Dagwood before 1930. The Dalton [GA] Citizen for May 1, 1908, page 2, had the usual gossip section about community doings. Under the tiny town of Tunnel Hill, the paper wrote “Quite a crowd of young people from Dagwood and Trickum attended the ice cream supper at this place Saturday night.”
Trickum is a former name for a place east of Atlanta. Dalton, however, is in the far northwest of Georgia and the other towns mentioned are either all over the state or not on the map. Maybe Dagwood existed at one time, although I can’t find a trace of its existence. It could be a simple typo for Dogwood but I can’t find a trace of that either.
I’m leaning toward Dagwood coming from dogwood/dagwood. The coincidence of timing is striking.
I wonder where the Australian word “dag” comes from? 
the little poop nuggets hanging from sheeps bums are called dags
I remember when I was about 9 years old or so being at a wedding reception with my parents. There was an old man there who was some sort of distant relative by marriage on my Dads side and his name was Dagwood. People called him Woody.
This was in the late 60’s. I’m certain he was older than the Blondie strip.
Yes, I know. I was just wondering about the etymology.
Using surnames as first names was happening 250+ years before Splash.
3 examples from Colonial America:
NY Governor DeWitt Clinton, born 1769, son of General James Clinton and his wife Mary De Witt.
Peyton Randolph of Virginia, born 1721, whose grandmother was Elizabeth Peyton, and his cousin Beverley Randolph, born 1706, whose mother was Elizabeth Beverley.
Wow! Now I’m glad I read this far down into the comments.
The Australian National Dictionary [2nd ed] devotes the better part of two pages to dag and derivatives, sadly without a really clear answer.
The strict sense of dag as sheep shit around the tail is British dialect, but the verb form ‘to dag’ seems to be Australian.
The sense of a socially awkward person, or a galoot, is Australian 20th century. It seems to come from a [non-sheep shit] British dialect word, in the same vein as a wag.