Word of the week: Dingus

That thing, that thing, that whatchamacallit thing.

America, writes Lyz Lenz, aka

lyz

, is “a country of the dinguses, by the dinguses, for the dinguses.” With such an embarrassment of embarrassments, you’d think it would be hard to select a single Dingus of the Year, but in 2024, Lenz declares, “one dingus truly made his mark on America for the worst”:

One man with a face so odious it was easy to believe he fucked a couch. One man with an affect so off-putting that he began with the lowest VP approval rating since Dan Quayle. JD Vance is what happens when you put eyeliner on a potato, give it a Bible, and send it to Yale Law.

(For “fucked a couch,” see my August 2024 post for the Strong Language blog.)

Weekly and annual Dingus awards are a feature of Lenz’s newsletter, Men Yell at Me; past DotY awards have gone to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. To qualify as a Dingus, Lenz writes, someone or something must be “the epitome of all that is silly, awful, enraging, and ridiculous in politics or popular culture” or “something making our lives a little worse.” Lenz has also popularized “dingularity” (a play on “singularity”) and “dingusry,” and has offered a circular definition: “The dingularity is a term describing the epic dingusry of a person or event, that sucks so much life and meaning from the world that it becomes a black hole of idiocy—the dingularity.”

All of this is amusing but slightly less than satisfying to a wordhound like me. I wanted to know more about “dingus”: where it came from, what it really means, how it spread. So I did some research, consulted An Actual Expert, and traveled some interesting byways in pursuit of the True Dingus.

A scene from “The Maltese Falcon” (1941). $1 million in 1941 = almost $22 million in 2025.

Here’s what the OED has to say about “dingus”:

colloquial (chiefly North American and South African). A thing, esp. a gadget or contraption, or (less commonly) a person, whose name the speaker or writer does not know, cannot remember, or does not care to specify precisely; a ‘thingummy’.

Both the American and the South African usages have a Dutch antecedent: dinges, an “item or person whose name the speaker does not know.” It basically means “thing” (a cognate word); the OED says “use of a person is only found in South African English,” which may have been true once but, as we’ve seen, is no longer the case. The earliest appearance in print of this sense of “dingus” was in an April 1866 issue of the Milwaukee (Wisconsin) Daily Sentinel: “All and singular every other utensil, tool, implement or dingus appertaining, or in any wise belonging to, with, around or about his complete little print-shop.” Sometimes the word was spelled “dingis.”¹

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) sprinkled “dingus” throughout his writing. In The Maltese Falcon (1930), he called the elusive black bird of the title “this dingus”; screenwriter/director John Huston retained “dingus” in this script for the 1941 film adaptation.

Hammett would have been aware of a secondary meaning of “dingus”: By the late 1880s, at least in the U.S., “dingus” could mean “penis” (or, sometimes, “rump”).² The OED’s earliest citation for this sense is from an 1888 book by Eugene Field, Stag Party, “a miscellany of ribald humor, innuendo, and mild smut.”: “All he’s got on, too, is a fig-leaf, and that aint big enough to hide his damned old dingus.” Stephen King used it in Dreamcatcher (2001): “Doing Christian charity did not make your dingus hard.”

And by the 1990s, if not earlier, “dingus” could also mean “a silly or inept person; a fool; an idiot.”

“Dingus” can be innocuous, as in the title of this 2017 middle-grade book by Andrew Larsen: “Henry is a likable boy trying hard not to be a dingus (translation: ‘a fool or a goof’) as he navigates the changes in both his home and social lives.”

I asked my Actual Expert,

Jonathon GREEN

, to comment on this evolution. Jonathon is a lexicographer, the editor of the invaluable Green’s Dictionary of Slang, and the author of the Substack newsletter Mister Slang. Here’s his response, slightly edited:

The equation of the penis and the fool is one of slang’s most popular. Dingus is one of many. Prick might be the best-known. Others include dick (and dickhead, dick-bomb and several compound insults, e.g. dicktard, dickweed and dickwit, that doubtless stretch to fools). Then there are dork (plus dorkbrain, dorkhead, dorkmunder), dildo, goober, plonker (which gained enormous popularity with the 1980s BBC-TV series Only Fools and Horses), pud, tool, weenie and yoyo. From Yiddish, where ‘fool’ is as productive as ‘snow’ allegedly is to the Inuit, come schmuck, schmo and putz.

Why the penis is turned idiot (and sometimes the case is vice-versa though the penis is usually the senior partner) has no canonical ruling. The idea of the sex-driven ‘little head’ ruling the supposedly more intelligent larger one may be there. Yet there is no sense that the, say, foolish tool is, in penis mode, in any way physiologically enviable. Nor the others. Maybe it’s to do with flaccidity, this dumb and dormant lump of meat?

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Here’s something else to think about: Beyond “dingus,” there are an impressive number of English words beginning with ding that mean either “fool” or “male genitalia.” A short list includes ding-a-ling (“a fool, an eccentric”); dingbat (originally “a stiff drink”; by the late 1870s “a crazy, eccentric, or foolish person”³; ding-dong (also originally “a stiff drink”; in the early 20th century “a stupid, dull person”); and dingleberry (“a doltish or contemptible person”; also a derisive term for military ornamentation; also the testicles). And although we now think of “dingo” as “Australian wild dog,” there was a time in the early 1970s when some U.S. college students were using it to mean “crazy.”

Oh, and one more thing: “Dingus” is also a proper noun, both fictional (“Dirty” Dingus McDuck, Scrooge McDuck’s grandfather) and real. According to the 2010 U.S. census there are 2,324 individuals in America surnamed Dingus, including Brenda Lynn Dingus, an American astrophysicist. There’s a Dingus, Kentucky, named for an early postmaster, Charles Dingus. The surname may be an Americanized spelling of German “Dinges.”

1. English has many words for “an item or person whose name the speaker does not know: thingamabob, doohickey, gizmo, whatchamacallit, etc. The umbrella term for such words is kadigan.

2. Plain old English “thing” can also refer to genitalia.

3. A “dingbat” is also a glyph used in typesetting, such as ❈.