FattyCorpuscle: That’s a much better name than horseshit shield.
AyrA_ch: In German it’s named “Armaturenbrett”, which is a compound word that loosely translating to “Board for gauges”
StepYaGameUp: Dashing through the snow, in a one horse open sleigh
lespaulstrat2: Most body styles of early cars were named after coaches/carriages. Sedan, Cabriolet, etc.
flaflashr: That explains so much about the Applications Dashboards that I see.
juwyro: The trunk is where you used to put your trunk on a carriage and a glove box is where you used to put your gloves.
ARCHIVEbit: Consumers call it the dash. Engineers that design it call it the instrument panel (IP)
OnkelFax: In german, a fender is called Kotflügel (shit wing), because it looks like a wing on the side of a car and protects the driver from, well, you get it.
wemadeyou: Horse-shit Board Confessional
TheKingOfDub: And now, ironically, it’s a place where car manufacturers deliberately put way too much shit
GodOfAllAtheists: I thought it was because you dashed your forehead against it in a crash.
obi1kenobi1: That’s why many early runabouts have names referring to the shape of their dash, despite not having anything even remotely resembling dashboards.
[Curved Dash Oldsmobile](http://www.vanderbiltcupraces.com/images/blog/12-1-2012_11-34-32_PM_edited-1.jpg)
DeepHorse: And even if it melts, you still have the radio
GoBay33: This wikipedia entry cites Merriam Webster as the source of the dashboard origin. At the bottom of the Merriam Webster page it says “First Known Use of dashboard 1842.”
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[Here](http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/84755133?searchTerm=dashboard&searchLimits=sortby=dateAsc) is an earlier example, from 1836. Advertisement for stuff to be sold in Launceston, Tasmania.
https://i.imgur.com/Kh5OLau.jpg
I dont mention it for any reason other than Trove being an interesting tool to look at the origins of words.
Soylent_Gringo: Hah! I thought it was where you “dashed” your head & face in a collision before the advent of safety belts.
Fraubump: I assumed it was the board for dashing your head against.
huskydoctor: That’s actually a really cool fact!
srmarmalade: And to think when I hear youngsters using the word in the context ‘I dashed it at him’ I thought it was yoot slang but it’s actually ye olde English. Every day is a school day!
5k3k73k: “Tire” comes from the word “attire”; as in dressing for the wheel.
incith: Dashed up and thrown up are very different.
sheamcvaugh: It’s interesting the way that a name can hang on beyond the tech itself.
I’m curious to know how long a graphical representation of a floppy disk will universally mean “save” to generations who have never seen one IRL.
Sanctimonius: And I just right now realised what that board is doing there on wagons. I always thought it was a footrest or something.
Neebat: And now dashboards are the worst performance hogs in software development. They tend to query a bunch of different stuff from different parts of the system, all of which takes a lot of time, and then they get hit constantly.
RudeTurnip: And now it’s a spreadsheet.