Frankfurters Vs Hot Dogs: What's The Big Difference?

Americans tend to use the word "frankfurter" in reference to hot dogs, often for the purposes of some punny business name like "Franks A Lot." Laughs aside, this isn't actually accurate, as a hot dog and a frankfurter are technically different things. Frankfurters are a German style of sausage named for the city of Frankfurt, while hot dogs are an American invention inspired by the frankfurter. They are mostly similar in appearance, although frankfurters tend to be a bit longer than hot dogs. The biggest difference lies in the ingredients.

Frankfurters are made from pork, while hot dogs can be made from various meats. The most popular meats for hot dogs are beef and pork (sometimes used in combination), but chicken and turkey are also used. The ingredients in a hot dog besides meat are mainly spices and curing agents. The same goes for frankfurters, but they differ when it comes to the casings.

Hot dogs can come in natural or synthetic casings, while the ones for frankfurters are traditionally fashioned from salted animal intestines. (If you've ever bitten a frankfurter and noticed a pronounced snap, you have that natural casing to thank.) Fans of hot dogs are probably also fond of the sausages' German-born counterparts, which makes sense considering the sausages' similarities and historical connection.

The question of where hot dogs come from leads us back to two locations that have claimed to be the birthplace of the modern hot dog. The first is the German city of Frankfurt with its eponymous frankfurters. Also in the mix is the Austrian capital Vienna, whose German name "Wien" is the root of "wiener." It is unclear which of these sausages came first. In any case, German immigrants who settled in New York City in the mid-1800s played a big role in popularizing sausages in the United States. The history of Oscar Mayer hot dogs, for example, began with a German-born butcher.

Nobody seems to be certain why Americans started using the term "hot dog" instead of frankfurter or wiener. It could be rooted in the fact that Germans have historically referred to frankfurters as "dachshunds" after the sausage-shaped German dog breed. One theory says that a confusion in translation led to Americans taking up the name hot dog. Another theory claims that the name originated in the 1890s among students at Yale who joked that the mysterious meat in their sausages was actually from dogs. A century and a half later, and not much has changed. We're still making the jokes about the mysterious meat in hot dogs and gobbling them up with glee.