1890–95, < German: Frankfort sausage; see -er 1
A frankfurter is another name for a hot dog. It's the mild sausage served on a bun that you eat while watching a baseball game. Depending where you're from, you might call a frankfurter a frank, a wiener, or a dog. Frankfurters are pink or red sausages made of meat trimmings packed inside a thin, edible casing, and served with mustard, ketchup, or relish. The name, adopted in English during the late 19th century, reflects the German heritage of all variations on the frankfurter — it comes from Frankfurter wurst, "sausage of Frankfurt."
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Delivery to the remote Yosemite National Park post office — as evidenced by what current Yosemite Postmaster Ellen Damin calls “the great frankfurter debacle” — has never been easy.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 23, 2025
As the sun set on a cloudy evening in Times Square on Friday, a 65-foot-long frankfurter cantilevered into the sky and spewed out a blast of rainbow confetti.
From New York Times ● May 7, 2024
He admits to having a similar maudlin blindspot when it comes to Detroit's Coney dogs — a beef frankfurter on a bun smothered in beanless chili, mustard, onions and shredded cheese.
From Salon ● Sep. 27, 2022
The annual Fourth of July frankfurter fest normally happens outside Nathan’s flagship shop in Brooklyn’s Coney Island neighborhood.
From Seattle Times ● Jul. 4, 2021
Nazario represented him and used the frankfurter cart as Bodega’s defense.
From "Bodega Dreams" by Ernesto Quinonez
The requirement to obtain permission had gone largely unnoticed until it was reported by the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper on Friday.
From BBC ● Apr. 4, 2026
At Harvard Law School, “Pop,” as his grandson called him, became an intimate of Felix Frankfurter, the future U.S.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 26, 2026
Rexford Tugwell, Felix Frankfurter, Adolf Berle—acolytes of the brain trust that encircled the president—were plucked from schools like Columbia and Harvard.
From Slate ● Mar. 17, 2025
The speaker was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was at home in Albany with his friend and advisor Felix Frankfurter, monitoring radio reports of a political disaster unfolding in Herbert Hoover’s Washington.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 29, 2024
Wing tips gleaming, my hair still damp, I was flipping through the Frankfurter Allgemeine when she rolled her unthinkable bicycle in.
From "Middlesex: A Novel" by Jeffrey Eugenides
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
