What does dada mean?
Dada is best known in two quite different guises. In everyday life it is the affectionate, infantile word babies typically utter first for their father — a natural product of early babbling, in which the repeated open syllable 'da-da' is among the easiest sounds to make. Adults rarely say 'dada' of each other, preferring 'dad' or 'daddy'; the term survives largely in nurseries, family anecdotes, and sentimental contexts such as a child's first spoken word. Separately, Dada — always capitalized — names the radical European art movement born during the First World War, whose members rejected reason, tradition, and artistic convention in favour of absurdity, chance, and provocation, producing collages, readymades, and performances that permanently widened the definition of art. The shared origin of both senses in the same playful, repetitive sound makes dada a small linguistic curiosity worth knowing.
An infant's word for its father; an informal, affectionate name for dad.
"Her first word was 'dada', said with a delighted squeal."
Chiefly used by or about very young children.
The early 20th-century European avant-garde movement known as Dada, which rejected logic and artistic convention in favour of absurdity, chance, and protest against war and bourgeois culture.
"Tristan Tzara's manifestos helped define Dada as an international phenomenon."
Always capitalized in this sense.
Rarely needed; pluralization occurs mainly in academic discussion of the art movement or in listing children's first words.
"Both twins said their 'dadas' on the same day."
A baby's babble gave us 'dada' as a word for dad — and a century ago, artists deliberately picked the same silly-sounding syllable to name an entire anti-art revolution.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of dada
'Dada' belongs to a widespread family of nursery terms for parents, built from simple reduplicated syllables ('dada', 'mama', 'papa') that appear across many unrelated languages because they mimic the earliest babbling of infants. Its ultimate source is not a single ancestral language but child speech itself, which is why cognates such as 'papa' and 'mama' share the same pattern rather than the same root. The capitalized 'Dada' of the art world was deliberately chosen around 1916 by artists in Zurich who reportedly liked the nonsensical, babyish sound of the word for a movement dedicated to irrationality.
How dada is actually used
As a family term, 'dada' is chiefly what infants call their fathers and is heard mainly in child-directed speech; adults more commonly use 'dad' or 'daddy'. The art-movement sense is always capitalized as 'Dada'. Both senses derive from reduplicated nursery syllables.
Easily confused with dada
'Data' are facts or information, while 'dada' is a childish name for father — the words differ by only one letter but nothing else.