The word first appeared in the November 12, 1914 edition of
Our Navy magazine, where it states, “We were compelled to
christen articles beyond our ken with such names as
‘do-hickeys’, ‘gadgets’ and ‘gilguys’.”
A Sailor Boy’s Log by
Robert Brown in 1886, where he also notes one of the first known
instances of “gadget”- “Then the names of all the other things
on board a ship! I don’t know half of them yet; even the sailors
forget at times, and if the exact name of anything they want
happens to slip from their memory, they call it a
chicken⁓fixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, or a timmey-noggy,
or a wim-wom.”
Doohickey soon spread
to being used by airman as well, with it noted in Edward Fraser
& John Gibbons’ 1925 Soldier & Sailor Words, that “doo
hickey” was an airman’s term for small, detachable fittings.
Within a couple decades, the word was being used widely
throughout America as a placeholder name for anything one could
not remember the name of.
Doohickey probably
derives from “doodad,” which has uncertain origin, but first
popped up in documented form about a decade before “doohickey,”
with doodad meaning “a superfluous ornament.” The sailors simply
meshed this term with “hickey,” which meant “a device for
bending a conduit or a small fitting used in wiring for electric
lights, a fixture piped for gas."
Who first used the term
“doohickey” has been lost to history. Other names used around
the time were doodad, hickey, doojigger, thingamawhatsit,
watchamacallit, thingummy, gadget, widget, gilguy, etc.
Incidentally, during
the late 1920s or early 1930s, hickey mostly referred
to pimples, then other marks on teenager necks, and later
began being used by printers to refer to various blemishes in
engravings.