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doodad

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
See also: doo-dad

English

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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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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

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Noun

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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[1], →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

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References

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