doodad

English

Alternative forms

• doo-dad (rare)
• dodad, do-dad (rare)
• dodab (rare)

Etymology

Unknown; attested since the 1880s. Compare earlier daud (“a piece of something”), later doohickey (“a thing (whose name one cannot recall)”), dialectal dad, dadge (“a large piece, chunk”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈduːdæd/

Noun

doodad (plural doodads)

1. (originally US) Used to refer to something whose name one cannot recall: an unspecified device, gadget, part, or thing.

   Synonyms: (Britain) doodah; see also Thesaurus:thingy

   My mom has a clever doodad for peeling oranges.

   • 1922, Sinclair Lewis, chapter I, in Babbitt, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Company, →OCLC, section IV, page 11:

     Of course I eat an apple every evening—an apple a day keeps the doctor away—but still, you ought to have more prunes, and not all these fancy doodads.

   • 1939, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep:

     The room was too big, the ceiling was too high, the doors were too tall, and the white carpet that went from wall to wall looked like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead. There were full-length mirrors and crystal doodads all over the place.

   • 2023 July 10, The Editorial Board, “The Flawed Moral Logic of Sending Cluster Munitions to Ukraine”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:

     The reason is that not all bomblets explode as they’re meant to, and thousands of small, unexploded grenades can lie around for years, even decades, before somebody — often, a child spotting a brightly colored, battery-size doodad on the ground — accidentally sets it off.

Translations

References

• Oxford English Dictionary, 1884–1928, and First Supplement, 1933.
• “doodad”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
• Douglas Harper (2001–2024) “doodad”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.
• Jonathon Green (2024) “doodad n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang

Further reading

• Wikipedia article on placeholder names