A nineteenth-century washing dolly, a stick with arms and legs used to agitate clothing in a washing tub
19 August 2020
A doll or dolly is an anthropomorphic child’s toy, often resembling a baby. A dolly also a wheeled platform that in no way resembles a human. How did one word come to have such different meanings? The answer lies in gradual additions and changes to what dolly could mean.
Doll and Dolly get their starts as a pet form of the name Dorothy, much like Hal is a pet name for Harry, Sall/Sally for Sarah, and Moll/Molly for Mary.
The name Doll dates to the sixteenth century, first recorded in Nice Wanton, an anonymous 1560 play:
But iche tell your minion doll, by gogs body:
It skylleth not she doth holde you as muche
Children back then, just as now, would name their toys, and the application of the name to a toy is first recorded in a 1699 slang dictionary:
Doll, a wooden Block to make up Commodes upon, also a Child’s Baby.
(The commode here is a cabinet or chest of drawers, not a toilet.)
The diminutive suffix -y is added to Doll by 1608, where it appears in Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece in a song sung by Valerius which espouses the virtues of a number of women with different names:
When I dally with my Dolly,
She is full of melancholly,
Oh that wench is pestilent holy,
Therefore ile haue none of Dolly. No no no, &c.
Dolly appears as a generic term for a woman by the middle of the seventeenth century. From Robert Herrick’s 1648 A Lyrick to Mirth:
While the milder Fates consent,
Let's enjoy our merryment:
Drink, and dance, and pipe, and play;
Kisse our Dollies night and day:
Crown'd with clusters of the Vine;
Let us sit, and quaffe our wine.
By the late eighteenth century, the term dolly began to be applied to a wooden device used to agitate clothing in a wash tub. Because the device was a pole with handles that resembled arms and with legs to stir the clothes, it bore a vague resemblance to a person, or to a child’s doll. The term appears by 1793 in the magazine The Looker-On, written by William Roberts under the pseudonym Simon Olive-Branch:
The Dumb Dolly, or a machine for washing, is recommended by some lively remarks on the saving of time.
From there, dolly began to be applied to a wide variety of devices used for different purposes, and eventually lost its association with the human form in this context. The sense of a wheeled platform appears by the turn of the twentieth century. From Samuel Merwin and Henry Webster’s novel Calumet “K,” first published in 1901:
Gangs of laborers were swarming over the lumber piles, pitching down the planks, and other gangs were carrying them away and piling them on “dollies,” to be pushed along the plank runways to the hoist.
Sources:
B. E. A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew. London: W. Hawes, 1699. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Herrick, Robert. Hesperides. London: John Williams and Francis Eglesfield, 1648, 41. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Heywood, Thomas. The Rape of Lucrece. London: E. Allde for I Busby, 1608, fol. 16v–17r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Merwin, Samuel and Henry Webster. Calumet “K” (1901). New York: MacMillan, 1905, 104. Hathitrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. doll, n.1.
A Preaty Interlude Called, Nice Wanton. London, John King, 1560, fol. 4r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Roberts, William (Simon Olive-Branch). The Looker-On, no. 39. London: Thomas and John Egerton, 26 January 1793, 308. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Photo credit: Museum of Rural English Life.