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Where does "hunky-dory" come from?

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📓 The short answer

“Hunky-dory” likely stems from Frisian honcke (“home”), later paired with a playful “-dory” suffix, and it entered everyday speech with the rise of 19th-century blackface minstrel shows.

📚 The long answer

If you're not familiar with the Americanism, to say something is "hunky-dory" is to say that everything is going alright or just fine.

Where does "hunky" come from?

"Hunky" has origins in the West Germanic languages of Frisian, in which "honcke" or "honck" means a house or place of refuge, and "hunk" means corner or nook.

By the early 1800s, New Amsterdam (later New York) children used “hunk” in their games—and it entered adult slang soon after. It was used in the phrase to "get hunk," as in to be made whole after a loss, appearing in a May 25, 1845 article about a horse race in The Spirit of the Times:

An 1859 publication of Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms also defined:

By 1861, a humorist writer Charles Farrar Browne began using "hunkey/hunky," especially in the phrase "hunkey boy" to mean good, manly, brave, or noble. Here's an example from a Vanity Fair piece of his from June 15, 1861:

Farrar Browne also used "hunky" to describe objects of high value in his writing in 1863:

By the mid-19th century, "hunky" was being used to describe things as good and fine. But that's only half of the phrase...

Where does "-dory" come from?

There's no definitive origin of why "-dory" was added after "hunky," but we have three main theories.

Theory #1: Reduplication

Many American slang terms use reduplication—repeating part of a word for emphasis. This linguistic element appears in "hotsy-totsy" (meaning very good or attractive), "okey-dokey" (meaning okay), and "hoity-toity" (meaning snobbish).

While there's no firm evidence, it's believed that the "-dory" was added to expand upon the word "hunky."

Theory #2: Western sailors visiting Japan

There is another explanation for "hunky-dory," but it also lacks evidence. It's often claimed that the phrase comes from Western sailors visiting Yokohama, Japan in the mid-19th century.

One of the streets in Yokohama is named Honchodori (roughly translated to main street) and was said to have either been a place with bars and brothels to service Western sailors or a street to guide them back to port. Either way, it's theorized that going to Honchodori could make one feel "hunky-dory."

The timeline works for this theory because Japan opened up to foreign trade in the 1850s, so it's possible that the older slang "hunky" was used in combination with Honchodori to bring a Western word to a Japanese term. (By the way,"dori" means street in Japanese, which makes the phrase confusing to some Japanese-English speakers.) Again this is only a possible, not proven, explanation, as there's no hard evidence linking "hunky-dory" to Japan.

Theory #3: A good boat

Another theory put forward by an online word nerd is that "hunky-dory" could have been a maritime phrase to talk about a good boat. "Dory" is a word traced back to the early 18th century used to refer to a small, flat-bottomed boat used in fishing. So it's not a huge leap to consider that one might have complimented a "hunky" boat in the 19th century. Still, no historical evidence backs this fishy idea.

We'll likely never know for certain why the "-dory" got added to the phrase, but we do know what helped propel the phrase into mainstream American slang. Unfortunately, like with plenty of American history, the phrase "hunky-dory" has a racist past.

How was "hunky-dory" popularized?

"Hunky-dory" started to show up in print and letters as early as the 1860s. The earliest use of “hunky-dory” in print I could find was from the New York Dispatch on May 8, 1864, where it appears in a tongue-in-cheek boxing preview of Generals Lee and Grant, mocking the sensational journalism of the time.

...If he can get in a right or left hander his man will prove a "hunky dory," and come down with his centre on the White House next Fall...

"Hunky-dory" (well, "Hunkey Dora," but close enough) is also found in a letter Civil War Union soldier Henry Warren Howe wrote to his family on November 3, 1864:

However the phrase arguably owes its mainstream breakthrough to a heinous (and extremely popular) form of American entertainment at the time—blackface minstrel shows.

If you're unfamiliar with blackface minstrel shows, they were comedic theatrical performances put on by mostly white actors wearing blackface paint acting out racist stereotypes of Black and Native American people.

Actors would caricature Black people as stupid, lazy, and superstitious to uphold myths of Black inferiority. Minstrel shows were especially popular with poorer white audiences because they reinforced a feeling of racial superiority and even convinced viewers they were watching authentic glimpses of plantation life (which, of course, they weren't).

From the 1840s through the 1870s, minstrel shows reigned supreme in American entertainment, and their songbooks and advertisements reveal how numerous celebrated troupes embraced the phrase “hunky-dory.”

Christy’s Minstrels—one of the most widely acclaimed blackface troupes throughout the 1850s and 1860s—featured “hunky-dory” in at least two of their songs:

"Josiphus Orange Blossom" My name it is Josiphus Orange Blossom, I'm the gayest colored ge'man in the land. With the pretty girls I always plays the possum. I'm a red-hot hunky-dory contraband. "Hunkey Dorey" One of the boys am I, That always am in clover; With spirits light and high, ‘Tis well I’m known all over. I am always to be found, A singing in my glory; With your smiling faces round, ‘Tis then I’m hunkey dorey

Also around this time, Dan Bryant’s blackface popular troupe named a Native American character “Hun-Kee-Do-Ree”—as shown in a January 22, 1865, New York Dispatch advertisement for the “Hun-kee-do-ree, the Live Ingin” show.

Left: Sourced from The Rucker Archive. | Right: Sourced from the Library of Congress.

Although blackface minstrelsy peaked in popularity in the late 19th century, it endured—and so did “hunky-dory.” For example, a 1931 play-text titled “Hunky-Dory Minstrels” still features the phrase prominently.

Although “hunky-dory” likely predates blackface minstrelsy, its rise on minstrel stages and in songbooks from the 1860s onward helped cement it as everyday speech in the United States.

--- Thanks for reading this week's newsletter! If you have any thoughts, questions, or favorite GIFs, my inbox is always open. Just hit reply to send me a note! :) ​ All my best, Caitlin ​Click here to read five facts about Caitlin​

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​Sources for this week's newsletter​

🌐 Wikipedia article of the week

​Loanword​

"A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing....

Tofu is an English loanword from the Japanese word tōfu, which is itself a loanword from the Chinese word dòufu."

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