Does anybody know the origins of the word Dude the way it is used today?

Answer 1

BTW, "fastidious" means excessively tidy. It went from "tidy man" to "city slicker on a cattle ranch" to plain old guy.

dude
1883, "fastidious man," New York City slang of unknown origin. The vogue word of 1883, originally used in ref. to the devotees of the "aesthetic" craze, later applied to city slickers, especially Easterners vacationing in the West (dude ranch first recorded 1921). Surfer slang application to any male is first recorded c.1970. Female form dudine (1883) has precedence over dudess (1885).

Answer 2

www.able2know.com states:
Our Living Language Cowboys and thee Wild West are indelibly set in the minds of many as typical of America -- an association borne out by several common Modern English words that originated in the speech of the 19th-century western United States. One is dude, now perhaps most familiar as a slang term with a wide range of uses (including use as an all-purpose interjection for expressing approval: "Dude!"). Originally it was applied to fancy-dressed city folk who went out west on vacation. In this usage it first appears in the 1870s. The origin of the word is not known, but a number of other cowboy terms were borrowed by early settlers from American Spanish. These include buckaroo, corral, lasso, mustang, ranch, rodeo, and stampede. Buckaroo, interestingly, is an example of a word borrowed twice: it is an Americanized form of Spanish vaquero, which also made it into English as vaquero, a cowboy.

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

"Dude" was a term that first gained currency in the late 1970s and was most common among surfers and skaters. In the movie, "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," Sean Penn's character, Jeff Spicolli, used the term to great comedic effect.