What is the origin of the phrase dop kit?

Answer 1

"...thanks to a discussion of the term "Dopp Kit" on the mailing list of the American Dialect Society (www.americandialect.org) a couple of years ago, I can assure you that "Dop" or "Dopp" isn't an acronym or abbreviation for anything. According to newspaper accounts unearthed by Merriam-Webster's Jim Rader, the Dopp Kit was first produced by Charles Doppelt, a leather goods designer who immigrated to the U.S. from Germany in the early 1900s. Although it may have been Doppelt's nephew and employee, Jerome Harris, who actually invented the snazzy leather toiletries case, Doppelt was the boss and so the finished product bore a cropped form of his name, giving us the "Dopp Kit." Dopp Kits were manufactured by the Charles Doppelt Company until the firm was purchased by Samsonite in the 1970s, and Dopp Kits today are made by Buxton. The popularity of Dopp Kits was evidently boosted considerably by World War II, in the course of which the U.S. Army issued them to recruits by the millions.

Incidentally, the "kit" part of Dopp Kit is not quite the same "kit" we use to mean "a collection of parts used to assemble a whole," as in "model airplane kit." A soldier's "kit" consists of the standard equipment and personal articles issued to and carried by a soldier on a regular basis." http://www.word-detective.com/103001.htm…