Diminutive of names like Odell or Otis; an informal pet form with no independent etymology.
Odie functions as a Southern American diminutive with several possible roots. It may derive from Odell, from Old English dill or woad-hill, or from Otis, which traces back through Old French Otes to the Old High German Audo, meaning wealth or fortune. It also carries faint resonance with the Norse god Odin — the Allfather of wisdom, war, and poetry — though that connection is almost certainly coincidental in American usage rather than intentional.
The name found quiet popularity in the rural American South during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where shortened, informal versions of longer names were practically a cultural institution. Odie appears in census records and county histories across Tennessee, Arkansas, and Alabama — modest, workingman names given without ceremony and worn without pretension. It has the warmth of a front-porch nickname that somehow made it onto a birth certificate, which is precisely its charm.
In the wider popular imagination, Odie is most recognizable as the blissfully oblivious yellow beagle in Jim Davis's Garfield comic strip, first published in 1978. That association gives the name a cheerful, tongue-out-and-tail-wagging energy that is hard to escape. Whether that helps or complicates things depends entirely on the family. What remains is a two-syllable name of genuine American folk character, unusual enough to stand out but plain enough to wear lightly.