The Curious History of the Name "Dick"

This is a chart showing you the number of babies given a certain name over time in the USA—the name my father was in fact given. His name was Dick.

Ok, that was the name he always used, but his actual given name was Richard. That Dick is a nickname for Richard seems peculiar to many Americans today, but here’s how that emerged: a classic Medieval nickname for Richard was Rick (as it remains today!). Rick was a shortened version of the name, which at the time was pronounced rather like “Rick-hart.” And in Medieval England, new nicknames were coined via rhyming—hence Rick became Dick. 

In the 1930s when my father was born, Richard was the fifth most popular name for children designated male at birth. But plenty of parents skipped the formality of naming their kid Richard before calling him Dick. They just named their children what they intended to call them. And you can see in the graph that Dick (as a given name) peaked in popularity in 1934. You can see similar patterns with other names—Elizabeth was the fifth most popular girls’ name when my father was born, but there were substantial number of children given the names Bessie and Lizzie at birth. 

Dick was once such a popular name that my own school reader in first grade was named Fun with Dick and Jane. The “Read with Dick and Jane” reading primer series was introduced in 1930, with the characters given common, generic names of the time. 

But as you can see in the graph, nobody is naming their kid Dick today. The name fell out of the top 1000 most common American names in 1968. Of course, names change over time in popularity—Bessie used to be a very popular given name in the 19th century, but by the 21st it had fallen out of the top 1000 names tracked by the Social Security Administration. But here is something interesting: while Bessie lost its popularity as a name, Elizabeth has been steadily popular for as long as we have American census records. (Despite fighting a revolutionary war to break with Britain, Americans remain forever enamored of giving their children the names of classic English royalty.) So the name Elizabeth has always been in the top 20. Yet the name Richard, however associated with Lionheartedness, has plummeted in cachet, from a top-ten name from the 1800s through 1970, to down around 250th in the US today. 

For a bit of context, baby names more popular than Richard today include Jace, Ace, Adonis, Atlas, Maverick, Legend, Zayden, Xander and Knox. . .

The once-venerable Richard really took a tumble as a name, while other names that were popular English “classics” have not—in the top 20 today you’ll see Henry and James and Theodore and William and Daniel. And it seems that the explanation for this not being the case for poor Richard is that the name was brought down by Dick. 

The reason the name Dick plummeted from grace is one you can probably intuit! It had become all too popular—as a slang term for a phallus. When the Dick and Jane books ceased publication in 1965, it was not because phonics had become popular (the “whole word” method in which children are just supposed to memorize what every word in the English language looks like by staring at it on a page was still the approved teaching technique). I strongly suspect that the series was cancelled because elementary-school teachers did not want their students regularly calling out “Dick!” in class.

There’s a longstanding and fascinating tendency for popular names to perform something quite odd. A popular man’s name can come to be used to refer to a whole group of men, or even all men as a class. Think of “John Doe,” or the Americanisms “G.I. Joe/Joe Blow/Joe Sixpack,” or the phrase, “Every Tom, Dick, and Harry,” or the way that in 1940s film noir, private investigators get called “private dicks.”  And conversely, typical men’s names are often used (via a process linguists call synecdoche) to refer to genitals men typically have—today, consider Willy, Peter, Jimmy, and most commonly, Dick. The extreme frequency of using the name Dick in this associative way now means that a child with that name is destined for a life of teasing and harassment. A kid named Peter can still move through life with at most the occasional ribbing, but parents believe (with good reason) that it would be cruel to name their child Dick, and are hesitant even to name their child Richard, which has become snickersome by association. 

But I'm not done with this topic! The reason I started looking into the popularity of my father’s name is because I learned something wild recently. It will at first sound completely unrelated—it has to do with the origin of the term “donkey.” 

Now, my folk understanding had been that the name “donkey” had been invented or borrowed from somewhere to replace the name by which said animals had been known in English for centuries: an ass. My belief had been that as the term “ass” became used to refer to both “rump” and that animal, it came to be seen as too rude to speak in polite company, so “donkey” was substituted.

Well. In a certain way I was right. It is true that ass, the name for the animal, comes to us from the Latin asinus. So does “asinine;” people have long rather rudely thought of donkeys as dumb. And the animal name “asse,” eventually spelled “ass,” was used in a modestly rude way in England for centuries to mean someone unintelligent. Meanwhile, the term for butt in Old English was ærs, whence cometh the modern British English “arse.” It was in American English that “arse” acquired the standard pronunciation “ass,” and was then confused with the name of the animal. So, Americans may have switched to “donkey” after that pronunciation shift to avoid sounding rude.

But where did “donkey” come from? Here comes the wild bit! It comes from “Donkey Dick.”

. . . What?

How did that phrase arise? I had considered “donkey dick” to be some rare and amusing contemporary slang phrase with no inherent meaning, substituted for a word in a sentence to comedic effect. But actually, it is a venerable old phrase! In the 1700s, London dockworkers apparently referred to one another in playful slang as "Donkey Dick" (“Ho, Donkey Dick, haul on that rope!”). And here is why: it seems that just as "Dick" was a nickname for Richard, "Donkey" (or Dunky) was a nickname for Duncan. The two were combined into "Donkey Dick" because it sounded entertaining. It evoked neither beasts of burden nor genitalia—it was simply an alliterative name used as a generic placeholder, as we might use "John Doe" or "Chad." It was akin to "Billy Bob."

Now, dockworkers hauled a lot of cargo. They did not have forklifts to drive around to accomplish this—but they did have animals—sometimes oxen or horses, but very often asses. And guess what is yet another thing that regularly got given common men’s nicknames? Those animal assistants. That is where we get the term “jackass”—it was originally Jack Ass, and one can presume there were also Teddy Asses and John Does hauling freight around the docks. Women’s names did sometimes make the cut—eventually “Jenny” became the generic English term for a female donkey. And another common name the asses got nicknamed? Donkey Dick, the popular placeholder name around the docks! Or, when being addressed informally by first name only, Donkey—which in time became a generic English alternative name for the species as a whole.

I just find it amusing that an old generic given name for an ass, Donkey Dick, which sounds to us today like something that would get you in trouble if you said it at school, morphed into the term “donkey” as a generic replacement for “ass” in order to sound polite when referring to that equine animal. It’s like the circle of euphemisms. 

And in the end, the fact that we don’t want to call donkeys asses, even though that was their English name for centuries, and you read it in the King James Bible (recall the ox and the ass at the Nativity), is because children all over the English-speaking world today bounce and snicker at Christmas plays whenever they hear the ass so named. And that’s also why Dick, the name my father was given in the 1930s, has fallen off a cliff when it comes to naming children today.