dodo: [17] When Portuguese explorers first encountered the unfortunate dodo on the island of Mauritius, it struck them as a clumsy and foolish bird, so they applied to it the Portuguese word doudo ‘simpleton’. The name has stuck in English (although in the 17th century it had some competition from the French and Dutch term dronte). The first record of the simile ‘dead as a dodo’ comes from 1904, over 200 years after the extinction of the species, although the word had been used since the late 19th century as a metaphor for someone or something hopelessly out of date: ‘He belongs to the Dodo race of real unmitigated toryism’, Lisle Carr, Judith Gwynne 1874. [dodo etymology, dodo origin, 英语词源]