Over the summer, a listener asked how hot dogs got their name. Sherry Wells said the topic came up amongst family and friends over the Fourth of July weekend, presumably during a cookout.
Since we have wonderful listeners who send us interesting questions all of the time, sometimes we miss seasonal questions until the season in question has long since passed. However, this is America, and in America, hot dogs are always in season.
There's evidence that the compound "hot dog" came into English by the late 19th century and served as a mass noun for a particular type of sausage meat, as in, "We're having hot dog for dinner." It was also a name for a type of sausage, typically a frankfurter or wienerwurst, served on an elongated bun.
There are a number of stories about where the term "hot dog" comes from, but the consensus is that when these smoked sausages, typically made with beef and pork, were brought over to America from Germany in the 1800s, Americans jokingly refer to them as "hot dogs" because of the dubious contents of the meat.
Yale law librarian Fred Shapiro has found evidence of a frankfurter vendor named Thomas Francis Xavier Morris selling "hot dogs" in Paterson, New Jersey as early as 1892.
This predates another popular origin story about the sports cartoonist Tad Dorgan, who later did draw a cartoon of a dachshund on a bun. As Ben Zimmer discussed on NPR in 2011, the story is that Dorgan didn't know how to spell "dachshund," so he wrote "hot dog" instead:
"This has been a very sturdy myth, even though there is not a bit of truth to this story," Zimmer said.
This week we also talked about calling certain people "hot dogs" and using "hot dog" as an exclamation. To hear that discussion, listen to the audio above.
