A familiar word for a friend
In present-day English, buddy names a friend, a partner in a shared task, or a stranger you address without knowing a given name. American speakers use it more freely than British ones, though the latter meet it constantly in film, workplaces, and the paired-safety rule called the buddy system. A person can have a fishing buddy, be assigned a training partner on the first day of a job, or hear the vocative when someone wants attention in a queue. The clipped form bud covers much of the same informal ground.
The origin of the word buddy is not settled. Standard dictionaries agree on the outline of its life in English and disagree on the parent form.
First records, and an American reputation
The Oxford English Dictionary places the earliest known use in the late 1700s, citing the actor, composer, and writer Charles Dibdin in 1788. Other widely used etymological references date the noun later and treat it as an Americanism: mid-nineteenth-century American English is the window they give, with 1850 a commonly cited year. Merriam-Webster’s current public entry is more conservative still, listing 1896 for the companion sense. The later print history is easier to see than the first spark. Frequency rises slowly through the nineteenth century and then sharply in the twentieth, when the word is ordinary American speech both as a noun of friendship and as a hail.
Caribbean and Guianese texts from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also show buddy as an address that writers gloss as brother. Those uses sit beside the North American record rather than proving a single birthplace. What is not in doubt is that this is modern English, not an Old English inheritance, and that it became a hallmark of informal American talk.
Two leading etymologies
Most desk dictionaries treat buddy as a reshaping of brother, often explained as nursery speech. Merriam-Webster puts it that way; the OED lists brother as the etymon and calls the noun a probable variant or alteration of another lexical item. The picture is that a child’s version of brother lost the r, took a diminutive-sounding ending, and was then adopted by adults as a friendly label.
A second account, long in circulation, derives the word from British dialect butty, a companion or workmate. That form is well attested in England and Wales from the eighteenth century, especially among coal miners, and by the early 1800s it could mean a partner in labour more generally. Some writers connect butty with older booty fellow, a confederate who shares plunder, recorded from the 1520s. The OED, however, marks the origin of butty itself as unknown, so the booty chain is a conjecture rather than a closed etymology.
Both paths are socially plausible, and neither is proven. The brother theory has the better lexicographic majority. Critics of it note a phonetic snag: English-speaking children usually replace r with a w-like sound, not simply drop it after b, so brother does not slide into buddy as neatly as the baby-talk story implies. Critics of the butty theory note that an American slang boom does not by itself prove a loan from mining dialect. The Oxford etymologist Anatoly Liberman has floated a third possibility: a Dutch nursery word for brother (forms such as dialectal boetje) that never contained an r. That remains a minority suggestion, useful mainly as a reminder that the r-loss problem has not been waved away.
The plant word bud is a red herring. English has had an adjective buddy, meaning full of buds, since Middle English, built from the botanical noun plus the suffix -y. That homonym is unrelated. The familiar short form bud for a person, attested from about 1851, is almost certainly a back-formation from the friend sense, not a metaphor from gardens.
From brotherly address to assigned partner
Early uses sit close to brother as a vocative: a man speaking to another man, sometimes a boy whose name is unknown, sometimes an actual elder sibling. Dialect notes from the American South in the early twentieth century still record buddie as a familiar name for the oldest brother and as a label for any small boy. From there the word widened into a noun for a chosen companion, the person you hunt, drink, travel, or serve with.
The twentieth century added institutional senses. The buddy system, pairing people so each watches the other, is attested from 1920. The verb, usually with up, appears in the 1910s and 1920s — one standard etymological dictionary gives 1925 and suggests early American underworld slang; Merriam-Webster dates the verb to 1916 — and means to pair off or become friendly. Buddy-buddy as an adjective, for a conspicuously close pair, is American English from 1952. Later still come the buddy film and the workplace or school partner assigned to a newcomer. The vocative can turn sharp: the same hail that greets a friend can warn a stranger to mind his step.
British English kept butty in its own channels — workmate in mining speech, and separately a buttered sandwich, a different word — while importing the American friend-term through popular culture. Informal friend-words in other languages occupy the same social slot without being kin: German Kumpel, Dutch maatje, French pote. Genuine cognates exist only if the brother etymology is right, in which case the distant family includes Latin frater, Greek phrater, and Sanskrit bhratar. Those forms explain brother, not the American vocative, unless the baby-talk path is accepted.
What the history leaves you with
If you want one firm date rather than a tidy pedigree, take 1788. That is the earliest citation the OED has found, decades before the American print boom that made the word sound like a New World coinage. The parent form is still in dispute: a worn-down brother, a British butty, or something still unidentified. The later career is the opposite of obscure. It became the ordinary English of friendship, of pairing for safety, and of the person you do not know well enough to name.