| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| dude |
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| PRONUNCIATION: |  d d, dyd |
| NOUN: | 1. Informal An Easterner or city person who vacations on a ranch in the West. 2. Informal A man who is very fancy or sharp in dress and demeanor. 3. Slang a. A man; a fellow. b. dudes Persons of either sex. | | TRANSITIVE VERB: | Inflected forms: dud·ed, dud·ing, dudes
Slang To dress elaborately or flamboyantly: got all duded up for the show. | | INTERJECTION: | Slang Used to express approval, satisfaction, or congratulations. | | ETYMOLOGY: | Origin unknown. | | OUR LIVING LANGUAGE: | Cowboys and the Wild West are indelibly set in the minds of many as typical of America—an association borne out by several common Modern English words that originated in the speech of the 19th-century western United States. One is dude, now perhaps most familiar as a slang term with a wide range of uses (including use as an all-purpose interjection for expressing approval: “Dude!”). Originally it was applied to fancy-dressed city folk who went out west on vacation. In this usage it first appears in the 1870s. The origin of the word is not known, but a number of other cowboy terms were borrowed by early settlers from American Spanish. These include buckaroo, corral, lasso, mustang, ranch, rodeo, and stampede. Buckaroo, interestingly, is an example of a word borrowed twice: it is an Americanized form of Spanish vaquero, which also made it into English as vaquero, a cowboy.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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