The word dildo probably began as nonsense syllables in old ballads
For centuries nobody could say where the word came from. Guesses included a boat's oar peg and the Italian diletto, meaning delight. In 2018 the Oxford English Dictionary settled on something sillier: filler syllables in early-modern folk songs, akin to hey diddle diddle, that became a coy euphemism.
The OED's evidence includes a seventeenth-century folk song in which a maid laments lacking a Dil Doul, a phrase that stands for a man's anatomy; a copy sat in the library of the diarist Samuel Pepys. One of the earliest English uses the dictionary records comes from the Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe, whose bawdy poem The Choise of Valentines dates to around 1593 and even mentions a version made of glass. The rejected oar-peg theory survives in geography: a Newfoundland town and a nearby island both carry the name.
Other languages had their own terms long before English lent them this one. Ancient Greek used olisbos, originally a leather object. Modern Spanish says consolador, meaning consoler, while Russian opts for a clinical compound meaning phallic imitator. Japanese makers have sometimes shaped such toys like animals or cartoon characters so they could be sold as ordinary toys and sidestep obscenity laws.
The objects themselves are ancient. A siltstone phallus about 20 centimetres long, found in Hohle Fels Cave near Ulm in Germany and dated to roughly 30,000 years ago, may have served the purpose, though most archaeologists are cautious about labelling Ice Age carvings this way. Timothy Taylor is a dissenter, arguing that colleagues avoid the obvious reading. Fifteenth-century Italians used leather, wood or stone, and some Chinese women of the same century were buried with lacquered wooden examples.
Classical literature is surprisingly frank. Aristophanes joked about the shortage of leather ones in Lysistrata, staged in 411 BCE, and Herodas built a short comic play in the third century BCE around a woman trying to track down the craftsman who made a friend's; he turns out to be a man named Kerdon posing as a cobbler. The classicist Page duBois has suggested such objects appear in Greek art because Greek men struggled to imagine sex without penetration. Today pure silicone is regarded as among the safest materials, since porous alternatives are hard to clean fully.
Source: Dildo
