The English language has a dick problem—namely the fact that the word “dick” has far too many meanings. Most of us just think of the term as a synonym for a jerk or a penis, but beyond these two common definitions the word can officially and validly mean:
- Richard, in diminutive, pet-name form
- A generic male person
- A private detective
- (In an archaic form) a declaration
- Nothing (i.e. “I got dick from it”)
- To abuse someone
- To waste time
- To have sex
- To botch or bungle
- To declare
That’s not even counting the now long forgotten uses of “dick” to refer to aprons, dictionaries, whips, and a unit measure of ten sheep. (Okay, the latter was only ever used in Cumbrian sheep counting, but still.) And the term can refer to whales (as in Moby Dick) or desserts (as in the English raisin pudding, “spotted dick”).
More often than not the meaning of the word is clear from context, but for anyone who likes to understand the roots of words, dicks are nightmares. The much half-assed speculation tries to explain away this diversity by showing how many diverse archaic and foreign terms could have been shortened (detective minus “t” and “ive” … makes deec … makes dick?) or corrupted towards one easy syllable, converging by happenstance upon a common utterance. But rather surprisingly, if you look into the history of “dick,” you’ll discover that almost all of its extant uses stem from one—maybe two—linguistic roots. The language’s dick diversity, in other words, is actually a beautifully complex dick continuum. That’s right. I just said “dick continuum.”
The great arc of dicks in the English language, it would seem, begins with the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and the conquerors’ introduction of the strong, Germanic name “Richard” into our lexicon. As the name became popular over the next two centuries, it was often shortened in writing to “Ric,” easing the work of the scribes and saving space on valuable parchment. From that abbreviation, many apparently adopted the nickname “Rick” as a standard diminutive of “Richard.” But the English of the era were fond of rhyming nicknames (a tradition preserved in modern singsong Cockney slang), and so they transformed “Rick” into the pet name “Dick.” It sounds like a stretch, but it’s the same linguistic evolution that takes us along these common lines:
Robert → Rob → Bob
William → Will → Bill
By the 16th century, Richard and the nickname Dick had become so common that it became a generic term for an average man, much as we might say John Smith today. By the end of the century, Shakespeare used the names “Tom, Dick and Francis” as common epithets in his Henry IV. And as comedy and literature came to associate this generalized everyman with a bumbling fool trampling through like, like our Joe Schmoe, the name took on a derogatory term that evolved to mean a fool or, eventually, a jerk.
You’d never guess it, but this use of “dick” as your average, nondescript bloke is where we get Moby Dick for a whale. Herman Melville based his white wale on a real-life deep seas tormentor named Mocha Dick, described in a New York magazine in 1839, shifting the first name slightly for unknown reasons. But the whale’s surname, he explains obliquely in chapter forty-five of his opus, comes from a common whale naming pattern, attaching the location the whale was first sited to a generic men’s name—like New Zealand Tom or Timor Jack, Mocha Dick was thus some Joe Schmoe whale sighted off the coast of the Indian Ocean island of Mocha.
No one’s quite sure how the word dick made its subsequent jump from the hapless everyman to genitalia, but we are fairly sure that it first appeared as British military slang in the late 19th century. And given that British soldiers of the time also coined the terms “peter” and “willy” for their members, dick likely took on its most vulgar meaning simply and unremarkably because it was another good, common men’s name that could be used euphemistically to refer to one’s own second brain and little soldier, helmeted and ready for war.
Some argue that the diminutive of Richard is also at the root of the term “dick” for private detective, rather than some forced and unconvincing abbreviation. Around 1908, the first time this usage is recorded, the detective novels of Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock, written under the pen name Dick Donovan and predating most Sherlock Holmes stories, were selling like hotcakes in America. The ubiquity of these texts and their titular detective bonded the nickname to the profession just like Band-Aid ™ has become synonymous with adhesive bandages.
It’s a good story, but it does have one shortcoming:
Most nouns begat associated verbs such as “to have sex” or “dick = penis” or “to waste time” or “to screw up” for “dick = jerk or stupid everyman. But that leaves both the “to declare” and “to mistreat someone” definitions unaccounted for and offers no verbal equivalent of dick-detective. An alternate explanation of the latter meaning fills in that gap.
According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, in the late 19th century the British criminal underworld was dominated by the Roma (often derogatorily known as Gypsies), in whose unique language the verb “dik” means to see, watch, or spy on someone. This association with crime and spying may have bastardized the term upon assimilation into the English language (along with other Roma words, like “posh”) to mean both a private detective and a verb of abuse. (And as for dick as a declaration or the act of declaring—and for dictionary—well, these may just be old, early English shortenings that’ve fallen out of usage.)
A few terms lie outside this great dick circle. We have almost no idea how aprons or whips came to be called dicks, for instance. These terms may trace back to some early adaptations of terms from other languages. But the great outlier is “spotted dick” pudding. No one’s 100 percent sure of the dish’s name’s origins, but our best guess is either an abbreviation of an old term for pudding, puddink/puddick, or a reference to an old variety of cheese used in baking the dish when it first appeared in the 19th century.
Either way, this and other obscure meanings of “dick” are comparatively few and far between exceptions to the great unity of “dicks.” For all its diversity of meaning, somehow there is continuity and commonality behind the term’s most common usages. And that is the beauty of language, ladies and dicks.
