Medieval diminutive of Roger, from Germanic Hrothgar meaning 'famous spear.'
Dodge is a medieval English given name with a surprisingly illustrious ancestry, functioning as a rhyming pet form of Roger — itself a Germanic name composed of hrod meaning fame and ger meaning spear. In medieval England, it was common practice to create rhyming nicknames by altering the initial consonant of a name, so Roger became Hodge, and through further variation, Dodge.
Both Hodge and Dodge appear in English records from the thirteenth century onward, and they eventually solidified as surnames carried by descendants of men who bore those nicknames. The Dodge surname became spectacularly prominent in American history through the Dodge brothers — John and Horace — who founded the Dodge automobile company in 1914 in Detroit, forever embedding the name in the mythology of American industry and muscle. The name also belongs to Dodge City, Kansas, the legendary cattle-drive boomtown that became synonymous with the frontier West, lawmen like Wyatt Earp, and the romanticized chaos of the American Wild West as portrayed in decades of film and television, most notably the long-running series Gunsmoke.
As a given name today, Dodge occupies the same rugged, unconventional space as names like Huck, Cash, or Flint — names that feel like characters rather than labels, carrying an unmistakable American swagger. It is bold, brief, and impossible to forget, a name that announces itself with a kind of confident, good-humored toughness.