21 August 2020
A doozy is American slang for something that is first-rate, excellent. Like many slang words, we don’t know the origin for sure and probably never will, but we have a pretty good guess in hand. It’s most likely a variation on an older, British slang term, daisy.
Doozy first appears as an adjective in Al Kleberg’s 1903 Slang Fables from Afar:
As soon as the races were billed he began to involve Schemes—one Doozy scheme followed the other—fellow clerks put him on and he knew a man who could look at a horse and guess within one second of his or her time per 5280 feet.
The noun appears by 1916.
The older daisy appears as an exclamation in the 1757 play The Author by Samuel Foote. In the scene a man proposes a game similar to Questions and Commands, which is a variant of what we today call Truth or Dare:
Young Cape. Hold a Minute. I have a Game to propose, where the Presence of a third Person, especially Mr. Cadwallader’s, wou’d totally ruin the Sport.
Mrs. Cadwallader. Ay, what can that be?
Cape. Can’t you guess?
Mrs. Cad. Not I; Questions and Commands? mayhap.
Cape. Not absolutely that—some little Resemblance; for I am to request, and you are to command.
Mrs. Cad. Oh daisy! that’s charming, I never play’d at that in all my born Days; come, begin then.
The superlative adjective daisiest appears in 1847, in this piece about the ecological impact of the Industrial Revolution. But here it’s not clear if the slang sense is being used, or if the word is meant literally to mean filled with flowers, or perhaps both:
For them the over-arched and almost hidden stream, that, dye-discoloured, serves a thousand factories, should be more endeared than the brightest rill that gurgles waste and unimpeded through the daisiest of meadows.
We see an unambiguous use of daisy as an adjective meaning good or excellent in a poem appearing in an American railroad labor journal of November 1877:
But when it comes down to do work in a hurry,
A daisier brakeman you’ll never find;
And if you depend on him to do switching.
You need never fear you’ll come in behind.
And both daisest and daisy appear in the slang sense in another poem found in the Harvard Lampoon of 21 December 1883:
The charms of the damsel were being discussed
At luncheon, in grand old Memorial Hall;
Said Smith, as he nibbled away at his crust,
“She’s the daisiest daisy I’ve seen this whole Fall.”
So,it seems likely that doozy evolved as a variant pronunciation of this sense of daisy.
It’s worth touching upon two popular origin stories for doozy that are incorrect, or in one case doubtful. The first, which is incorrect, is that the slang term is clipping of Duesenberg, an American manufacturer of race cars and luxury automobiles. These cars were often affectionately dubbed Duesies or Doozies. But the company wasn’t founded until 1913, nearly a decade after the slang term had appeared. So, the nickname for the car was influenced by the slang term, not the other way around.
The second origin story associates doozy with actress Eleanora Duse (1858–1924). Duse was quite famous in her day, the period in which the term arose, and that she would inspire such a slang term is at least plausible on its face. But there is no evidence linking her to the term; it’s speculation without support, leaving the older slang term daisy as the only solid explanation.
Sources:
“The Arcadia of this Age.” Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, vol. 5, 1847, 136. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Foote, Samuel. The Author. Dublin: P. Wilson and W. Sleater, 1757, 19. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. doozy adj.
“Inversion.” The Harvard Lampoon, ser. 2, vol. 6, no. 6, 21 December 1883, 57. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Kleberg, Al. Slang Fables from Afar. Baltimore: Phoenix Publishing, 1903, 83. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“A Lay of the Old ‘69.’” The Brotherhood Magazine, vol. 1, no. 12, November 1877, 376. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, Additions Series, 1993, s.v. doozy, adj. and n.
———, second edition, 1989, s.v. daisy, n.