From Greek 'doron' meaning gift, or French 'doré' meaning golden.
Dory is an English diminutive with multiple possible origins. Most directly it derives from Doris, the ancient Greek name for a sea nymph and one of the Oceanids in Greek mythology — daughters of the Titans Oceanus and Tethys, minor goddesses associated with the sea's fertility and abundance. Doris gave her name to the Dorian people and, indirectly, to the Dorian mode in music.
The diminutive Dory, then, carries a saltwater undertow: small, nimble, associated with the deep. It can also be a diminutive of Dorothy, which traces through Greek *Dorothea* — a compound of *doron* (gift) and *theos* (god) — meaning "gift of God." In sailing tradition, a dory is a small, flat-bottomed fishing boat particularly associated with New England and the Grand Banks cod fishery.
This nautical meaning was most famously employed in Rudyard Kipling's 1897 novel *Captains Courageous*, in which dories are central to the plot. The word's origins are disputed — possibly from the Miskito *dori* (dugout) — but its association with small, hardy, seaworthy craft gives the name an appealing undercurrent of resilience and independence. Contemporary audiences overwhelmingly associate the name with Dory, the blue tang fish voiced by Ellen DeGeneres in Pixar's *Finding Nemo* (2003) and *Finding Dory* (2016).
That character — forgetful, endlessly optimistic, bracingly kind — gave the name an enormous warm-hearted pop-cultural profile. For parents, Dory now reads as both vintage (it was used as a given name as early as the 1880s) and newly charming, a name that is short, cheerful, and impossible to say without smiling.