865: golliwog, polliwog, and poll Apr 21, 2017

You might be surprised by the etymological similarities between a fictional doll, frogs, and voting. The word around which they all center is, 'poll'. In the case of the doll, 'golliwog' entered the English language denoting soft dolls, especially with bright clothes and dark faces in the late 1800's after the name of a character in a book by Bertha Upton which is thought to be inspired by 'polliwog' to some extent. The relation to 'poll' here in first half of 'polliwog' is also connected to the term 'tadpole'. Both of those words, and the earlier 'pollywiggle' have the 'poll' which is a dialectal way of saying, 'head'; the '-wiggle' and '-wog' denoted the way that they look like wiggling heads, and 'tad-' was a from the Old English for 'toad'. Finally, voting, or in this case political polling, was a sense of this word that only came about relatively recently in poll's history, but relates to heads just as much as any other derivative. In the political sense, the word came from the idea of counting heads, or individual people. If you don't think about it too hard, this really gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'ahead in the polls'.