It is called a hot dog because of a joke. In the 19th century Americans liked to suggest that sausages were made of dog meat, and “dog” became slang for a sausage. A hot sausage in a roll became a hot dog, and by the 1890s the name was turning up in newspapers and college magazines. The story most people have heard, about a cartoonist at a baseball game who could not spell “dachshund”, turns out to be a myth.
The cartoonist story, and why it fails
The popular version goes like this. At the Polo Grounds in New York, vendors working for the caterer Harry Stevens sold “red hot dachshund sausages”. The sports cartoonist T. A. Dorgan, known as TAD, drew them, could not spell dachshund, and wrote “hot dog” instead. The date usually given was 1906, later moved back to 1901.
The word researcher Barry Popik points out the problems. TAD was not even working for the New York Evening Journal in 1901. His first two “hot dog” cartoons appeared on 12 and 13 December 1906, and they were about a six-day bicycle race at Madison Square Garden, not a baseball game at the Polo Grounds. The etymologist Michael Quinion adds the decisive point: the phrase was in print years before any of this, so neither Dorgan nor Stevens could have invented it.
The real trail: 1892 and Yale
The earliest known use of “hot dog” for a sausage in a roll, according to Popik, appeared in the Paterson Daily Press in New Jersey on 31 December 1892. A small boy orders a “hot dog”, and the paper explains it as a frankfurter and a roll, with mustard.
Within two years the name had reached Yale. A “dog wagon” that students nicknamed the Kennel Club opened there in the fall of 1894. In December 1894 the Yale Literary Magazine referred to a “Hot Dog on Wheels”. On 19 October 1895 the Yale Record described students who “contentedly munched hot dogs” during a service. Quinion’s article gives this 1895 line as the first recorded use; Popik’s newspaper find pushes the date back to 1892.
Why “dog”?
The name only works because of a much older suspicion. In the 19th century, jokes about dog meat in sausages were common. Quinion traces the link between dogs and sausages to mid-19th-century America and mentions a popular song from 1860 on the theme. Popik collects jokes from the 1880s, including an 1887 newspaper remark that “dog” and “sausage” had become almost interchangeable terms.
So “hot dog” was student humour and street slang before it was a menu item. It said, with a wink, what everyone half suspected was in the bun.
Who did the digging
Most of what is known about the name comes from a small group of word hunters working through old newspapers and college magazines. Gerald Cohen, David Shulman and Barry Popik published their findings in a monograph, Origin of the Term “Hot Dog”, in 2004. Leonard Zwilling of the Dictionary of American Regional English found the 1906 Dorgan cartoon that shows the cartoonist came late to the party.
The dachshund story has survived anyway, because it is a better anecdote than the truth. The truth is less charming: the name began as a joke about what sausages were made of, and the joke stuck so well that nobody remembers it was one.
