hunky-dory

The popular story

The favourite origin tale is nautical and exotic. It holds that American sailors on shore leave in Yokohama frequented a street called Honcho-dori, full of the diversions sailors seek, and that ‘Honcho-dori’ passed into naval slang as ‘hunky-dory’, a byword for easy street where everything is agreeable. The story is repeated in many collections of word lore, and it has the appeal of a concrete place and a plausible route by which a foreign name might be anglicised.

What the record shows

Two things complicate the tale. First, the word is well recorded in the United States in the mid-1860s with no hint of Japan. It appears in print in 1866, notably in the magazine The Galaxy in an article on slang called ‘Live Metaphors’, which even pokes fun at how odd the word is.

why anything that is ‘hunkee doree,’ or ‘hefty,’ or ‘kindy dusty,’ should be so admirable

The same year a Texas newspaper advises that after a wash you will be all ‘Hunky-dore’, fresh as a lily; and a use on a political banner has been reported from 1864. The early spellings vary, hunkee doree, hunky-dore, hunky-dory, which is typical of a word spreading by ear.

Second, the first half of the word has a respectable pedigree of its own. ‘Hunky’ was already American slang meaning safe, sound or in good position, and it is generally traced to the Dutch ‘honk’, the word for a goal or ‘home’ in children’s games, brought to New York by Dutch settlers. To be at honk was to be safe; to be ‘hunky’ was to be fine. The addition of ‘-dory’ looks like ordinary reduplication, the rhyming echo that produces ‘okey-dokey’, ‘helter-skelter’ and ‘namby-pamby’. On this reading, ‘hunky-dory’ is simply ‘hunky’ given a playful tail, and needs no ocean voyage at all.

The Dutch inheritance is worth dwelling on, because New York, formerly New Amsterdam, left a surprising number of such words in American English. ‘Honk’ as the safe base or goal in a children’s chasing game gave ‘hunky’ for anyone in a secure position, and from there the sense of ‘fine’ or ‘all right’ follows easily. Reduplication then does the rest. English loves to double a word with a rhyming or near-rhyming echo, and the added element rarely means anything by itself: the ‘-dokey’ of ‘okey-dokey’ is not a word, and neither, in all likelihood, is the ‘-dory’ of ‘hunky-dory’. Seen this way, the phrase is a small, ordinary product of two well-known habits of the language, immigrant borrowing and playful reduplication, which is a good deal less romantic than a Yokohama street but far better supported.

The verdict

The honest label is unproven. The Yokohama story cannot be shown to be false, and the timing is not impossible, since Japan had been opened to American ships in the previous decade. But there is no documentary link between the street and the phrase, and the word is already circulating in America by 1866 in ordinary slang. The competing account, older ‘hunky’ plus a reduplicated ending, is simpler and rests on attested pieces. Neither can be proven outright, so the fair verdict is that the origin is plausible but unestablished, with the domestic explanation the stronger candidate.

What we don’t know

We do not know for certain how the ‘-dory’ was arrived at, only that reduplication is the likeliest mechanism. We cannot rule the Japanese route entirely out, because absence of a recorded link is not proof of no link; but nor can anyone supply the evidence that would make it more than a story. The most we can say is that ‘hunky’ is the solid part and ‘dory’ the decorative one.

One reason the Japanese story has proved so durable is that it is difficult to disprove outright. Japan had been reopened to American shipping in the 1850s, so sailors certainly did reach Yokohama in the right era, and a foreign place-name reshaped into homely English is the kind of thing that really does happen. But ‘could have happened’ is not evidence that it did, and the burden falls on the exotic claim, not on the plain one. Set beside a word already circulating in American newspapers and an ending explained by an everyday habit of English, the Honcho-dori tale looks like a later embroidery on a word whose real workings are more modest.

How it changed

The meaning has scarcely shifted. From its first appearances ‘hunky-dory’ has meant fine, satisfactory, all in good order, and it has kept that cheerful, faintly old-fashioned flavour ever since. What changed was mostly the spelling, which settled from the various 1860s forms into the modern ‘hunky-dory’ as the word passed from ear to print and back again.

Usage today

Today the word is a breezy way to say that all is well, often after a spell of doubt: the tests came back and everything is hunky-dory. It is informal and good-humoured, at home in speech and light writing, and it carries a slight period charm. If the Yokohama tale comes up, the accurate reply is that it is unproven, and that the word most likely grew at home from the older slang ‘hunky’. The phrase makes a tidy lesson in how to weigh origin stories: prefer the explanation built from attested parts over the one built from a single striking coincidence, and be willing to say ‘probably’ rather than reach for a certainty the record does not offer. On that test ‘hunky-dory’ is home-grown, cheerful and, in its deepest origins, only ever probable.