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Dude is an American English slang term for an individual. It typically applies to men, although the word can encompass either sex.
Dude is an old term, recognized by multiple generations although potentially with slightly different meanings. From the 1870s to the 1960s, dude primarily meant a person who dressed in an extremely fashionable manner (a dandy) or a citified person who was visiting a rural location but stuck out (a city slicker). In the 1960s, dude evolved to mean any male person, a meaning that slipped into mainstream American slang in the 1970s. Current slang retains at least some use of all three of these common meanings.
History
The word may have derived from the Scottish term for clothes, duddies. The term "dude" was first used in print in 1876, in Putnam's Magazine, to mock how a woman was dressed (as a "dud"/dude). The use of the word "dudde" for clothing in English goes as far back as 1567.
In the popular press of the 1880s and 1890s, "dude" was a new word for "dandy" – an extremely well-dressed male, a man who paid particular importance to how he appeared. The café society and Bright Young Things of the late 1800s and early 1900s were populated with dudes. Young men of leisure vied to show off their wardrobes. The best known of this type is probably Evander Berry Wall, who was dubbed "King of the Dudes" in 1880s New York and maintained a reputation for sartorial splendor all his life. This version of the word is still in occasional use in American slang, as in the phrase "all duded up" for getting dressed in fancy clothes.
The word was used to refer to Easterners and referred to a man with "store bought clothes". The word "dude" derived from the Spanish phrase "lo dudo" meaning "doubtful". The word was used by cowboys to unfavorably refer to the city dwellers.
A variation of this was a "well-dressed man who is unfamiliar with life outside a large city." In The Home and Farm Manual (1883), author Jonathan Periam used the term "dude" several times to denote an ill-bred and ignorant, but ostentatious, man from the city.
The implication of an individual who is unfamiliar with the demands of life outside of urban settings gave rise to the definition of dude as a city slicker, or "an Easterner in the [United States] West". Thus "dude" was used to describe the wealthy men of the expansion of the United States during the 19th century by ranch-and-homestead-bound settlers of the American Old West. This use is reflected in the dude ranch, a guest ranch catering to urbanites seeking more rural experiences. Dude ranches began to appear in the American West in the early 20th century, for wealthy Easterners who came to experience the "cowboy life." The implicit contrast is with those persons accustomed to a given frontier, agricultural, mining, or other rural setting. This usage of "dude" was still in use in the 1950s in America, as a word for a tourist—of either gender—who attempts to dress like the local culture but fails. An inverse of these uses of "dude" would be the term "redneck," a contemporary American colloquialism referring to poor farmers and uneducated persons, which itself became pejorative, and is also still in use.
The term was also used as a job description, such as "bush hook dude" as a position on a railroad in the 1880s. For an example, see the Stampede Tunnel.
In the early 1960s, dude became prominent in surfer culture as a synonym of guy or fella. The female equivalent was "dudette" or "dudess," but these have both fallen into disuse, and "dude" is now also used as a unisex term. This more general meaning of "dude" started creeping into the mainstream in the mid-1970s. "Dude," particularly in surfer and "bro" culture, is generally used informally to address someone ("Dude, I'm glad you finally called") or refer to another person ("That dude is stealing my car").
The usage of the word to mean a "cool person" was further popularized in American films of the 1980s and 1990s such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Wayne's World, and Clerks.
The 1998 film The Big Lebowski featured Jeff Bridges as "The Dude", described as a "lazy deadbeat". The character was largely inspired by activist and producer Jeff Dowd who has been called "Dude" since childhood. The film's central character inspired the creation of Dudeism, a neoreligion.
The 2000 film Dude, Where's My Car? uses the word in the title.
In 2008, Bud Light aired an advertising campaign in which the dialogue consists entirely of different inflections of "Dude!" and does not mention the product by name. It was a followup to their near-identical and more widely noted "Whassup?" campaign.