Etymology

American. Earlier seen also as dozy. From the flower named daisy, English slang from the eighteenth century on, for something that was particularly appealing or excellent. It moved into North American English in the early nineteenth century and turns up, for example, in Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker of 1836: "I raised a four year old colt once, half blood, a perfect picture of a horse, and a genuine clipper, could gallop like the wind; a real daisy, a perfect doll, had an eye like a weasel, and nostrils like Commodore Rodgers’s speakin’ trumpet". Often attributed in folk etymology to "Duesie", a nickname for the early-Twentieth-Century American luxury automobile, Duesenberg, but this is certainly false as the term predates the automobile.

Pronunciation