Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. (orig. US) an older man who is willing to provide the various material wants of a younger mistress or, if gay, a younger male lover; thus punning saccharine daddy, an older male ‘friend’ with no sex involved.

1917		Language Series I 30: You’re plainly a fool to think that man will be your lover and sugar daddy forever.
1923		Syracuse (N.Y.) Herald 27 Mar. 8: Anna Pinkweed, tiring of her home town, Bogash, O., goes to New York to really live [...] Thus Anna was left with the bewhiskered Sugar Daddy who wanted the knife.
1923		T.A. Dorgan in Zwilling TAD Lex. (1993) 80: My guess is this. The first is either the owner of a blind pig or a sugar papa. The second runs a movie school.
1936		(con. 1920s) Dos Passos Big Money in USA (1966) 989: And me thinkin’ you was an elderly sugardaddy.
1937		J.M. Cain Serenade (1985) 20: No use having her think she’d hooked a nice American sugar papa.
1946		Mezzrow & Wolfe Really the Blues 84: Sugar daddies with their sable-sporting chicken dinners.
c.1950		K. Howard Small Time Crooks 13: Plenty of the dames had nothing to show but themselves and no audience bigger than a two hundred pound sugar-daddy.
1962		R. Hauser Homosexual Society 45: [I was] the official ‘nephew’. I got into trouble when I was over twenty and my sugar daddy picked himself up a fourteen-year-old boy.
1977		(con. 1949) J.G. Dunne True Confessions (1979) 306: Someone had to give her the tip, right? [...] A sugar-daddy type, maybe . .
1978		L. Kramer Faggots 111: [in a homosexual context] There might be the odd old sugar daddy who arrived at midnight.
1979		E. Torres After Hours 38: Where am I goin’ with their sugar-pops?
1980		E. Folb Runnin’ Down Some Lines 147: Like to catch one o’ dem sugars for myself!
1982		P. Bailey Eng. Madam 72: My sugar daddy pampered me, he really did.
1990		(con. early 1950s) J. Ellroy L.A. Confidential 210: Access to quote classy call girls unquote who might pose for a lark if their quote crazy sugar daddyo unquote agreed.
1994		R.P. McNamara Times Square Hustler 40: [of a gay man] He has turned tricks, danced in the clubs, ‘worked sugar daddies’ for money, clothes, and housing.
1996		K. Lette Mad Cows 110: Taught to ensnare ‘saccharine daddies’ (i.e. sugar daddies without the sex).
1999		Indep. Rev. 25 June 6: She had read Lolita at 13 and [...] nurtured fantasies of being taken around American motels by a sugar daddy.
2001		N. Barlay Hooky Gear 96: Either she got a rich dad she never acquaint me with or she got a sugar dad she kept secret.
2006		D. Seabrook Jack of Jumps (2007) 307: She had a sugar daddy, a motorist she’d solicited.
2012		Triniday Express 31 Jan. 🌐 I suspect this sugar-daddy has healthy life insurance policy.
2018		News-Star (Monroe, LA) 23 Jan. A8/1: A web-based company that connects ‘sugar daddies’ with ‘sugar babies’.
2022		J. Hannaham Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit 267: I hope that’s like a sugar daddy [...] some motherfucker out there like to spoil a old lady.
2024		J. Meades Empty Wigs (t/s) 125: She whispered: ‘You could be my sugar daddy’.

2. as sense 1 but used in non-sexual contexts.

1994		M. Ribowsky Don’t Look Back 167: The newest benefactor in Satchel Paige’s near-lifelong litany of baseball sugar daddies was a moneyed Mexican beer distributor.
2017		L. McInerney Blood Miracles 54: [of a gang boss] ‘Right so, fuck off back to your sugar daddy’.
2019		S.M. Jones Lives Laid Away [ebook] ‘Word on the street is you some kinda neighborhood sugah-daddy’.

3. see sugar baby n.