In its home country of , the hot dog was called the frankfurter. It was named after , a German city.
Frankfurters were first sold in the in the 1860s. Americans called frankfurters "dachshund ." A dachshund is a from Germany with a very long body and short legs. "Dachshund sausage" seemed like a good name for the frankfurter.
Dachshund sausages first became popular in , especially at baseball games. At games they were sold by men who kept them warm in hot-water . As the men walked up and down the rows of people, they yelled, "Get your dachshund sausages! Get your hot dachshund sausages!" People got the sausages on a special kind of bread called a .
One day in 1906, a newspaper cartoonist named Tad Dorgan went to a game. When he saw the men with the dachshund sausages, he got an idea for a . The next day at the newspaper office, he drew a bun with a dachshund inside—not a dachshund sausage, but a dachshund dog. Dorgan didn't know how to spell dachshund. Under the cartoon, he wrote "Get your hot dogs!"
The cartoon was a and so was the new name. If you go to a baseball game today, you can still see sellers walking around with hot-water tanks. As they walk up and down the rows, they yell, "Get your hot dogs here! "
