"Dodo": Origin and Meanings of the Word

The dodo was a bird that became extinct over 300 years ago. However, its memory is constantly kept alive through the use of its name in several popular expressions.

The dodo was native to Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean. Portuguese explorers discovered both the island and the bird in the early 1500s.

The bird was bizarre. Larger than a turkey, its bulky body weighed about 50 pounds and was supported by stubby yellow legs. Its blue-gray plumage was capped by a tuft of curly feathers high on its rear end. It had a big head ending in a 9-inch blackish bill with a reddish hooked tip. Its rudimentary wings were useless for its huge body, so the bird could not fly.

Because of the bird's odd appearance and clumsy behavior, the Portuguese named it with a Portuguese adjective meaning "silly, stupid": doudo.

The best-known early use of the name in English came in a 1628 letter by Edward Altham, in which he reported his encounter on the island of Mauritius with a "strange fowle...called by [the Portuguese] a DoDo" (Oxford English Dictionary).

Before the arrival of European settlers on Mauritius, great numbers of dodos inhabited the island. However, predators-namely, humans and other animals that humans introduced on Mauritius, such as hogs, rats, and dogs-exterminated the poor dodo by 1681. (On the nearby island of Réunion, a similar bird, usually referred to as a solitaire but also sometimes called a dodo, became extinct under similar circumstances a short time later.)

Long after it was physically gone, the dodo continued to live on the lips of English speakers who used expressions that associated the bird with two ideas: extinction and stupidity. Those associations are still in the language today.

The dodo, as an extinct bird, is a "dead" species. That fact and the catchy alliteration of the d's in dead and dodo account for the common expression (as) dead as a dodo, meaning certainly dead.

Because of the bird's association with extinction, a person unaware of changing conditions and new ideas, that is, someone hopelessly behind the times (as if no longer living in the present), is called a dodo. This idea is sometimes softened by using a phrase of indirection, such as "he's as out of date as a dodo" or "she's gone the way of the dodo."

The dodo, of course, was actually named by the Portuguese for its apparent stupidity. Its helplessness against the people and animals who settled Mauritius seemed to confirm its lack of resourcefulness. Today, in the spirit of either meanness or humor, people refer to a supposedly stupid person as a dodo.
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Lyman, Darryl. Dictionary of Animal Words and Phrases. Middle Village: New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 1994.

The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1989.