doodad
noun/ˈduːdæd/
Etymology Unknown; attested since the 1880s. Compare earlier daud (“a piece of something”), later doohickey (“a thing (whose name one cannot recall)”), dialectal dad, dadge (“a large piece, chunk”).
1
Used to refer to something whose name one cannot recall: an unspecified device, gadget, part, or thing.
- My mom has a clever doodad for peeling oranges.
- Of course I eat an apple every evening—an apple a day keeps the doctor away—but still, you ought to have more prunes, and not all these fancy doodads.1922, Sinclair Lewis, chapter I, in Babbitt, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Company, →OCLC, section IV, page 11:
2 more examples
- The room was too big, the ceiling was too high, the doors were too tall, and the white carpet that went from wall to wall looked like a fresh fall of snow at Lake Arrowhead. There were full-length mirrors and crystal doodads all over the place.1939, Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep:
- The reason is that not all bomblets explode as they’re meant to, and thousands of small, unexploded grenades can lie around for years, even decades, before somebody — often, a child spotting a brightly colored, battery-size doodad on the ground — accidentally sets it off.2023 July 10, The Editorial Board, “The Flawed Moral Logic of Sending Cluster Munitions to Ukraine”, in The New York Times, →ISSN: