I am aware that the term is considered offensive. And I know that it refers to soft faced black dolls. But before that character was introduced, did 'golliwog' have meaning? I mean was it made up, or was it coined from other words? I am not really sure I made myself clear.
Learn English – Where did the word ‘golliwog’ come from
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The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't have doublespeak as a separate entry; I can only make an educated guess. The word double-talk already existed in 1938, according to the OED, and was originally American. But apparently it meant simply "deliberate gibberish" then, i.e. not merely ambiguous language, but nonsense talk that listeners were supposed to know meant nothing, uttered to comical or artistic effect.
1938 New York Panorama (Amer. Guide Ser.) vi. 156 Of late a humorously conceived system of language corruption called double talk ... has made itself felt. Ibid. 157 Double talk is created by mixing plausible-sounding gibberish into ordinary conversation, the speaker keeping a straight face or dead pan and enunciating casually or off the cuff.
1941 Time 16 June 61/1 Thirteen recorded versions of this pandemic double-talk ballad are available.
1945 H. I. Phillips Private Purkey's Private Peace xxii. 129 We got the right slant on bullies, greaseballs, double talkers, supermen, and dopes.
1948 Auden Age of Anxiety vi. 125 And all species of space respond in our own Contradictory dialect, the double talk Of ambiguous bodies.
After Orwell's famous novel 1984, published in 1948/1949, double-talk apparently acquired the (additional?) meaning "deceiving language", i.e. language that is deliberately ambiguous, or language that appears to mean one thing but in fact means another.
1950 Amer. Speech XXV. 190 Back in Tsarist times Lenin and his associates inaugurated this double-talk and double-writing—especially the latter—in order to deceive the Tsarist censors and police.
1952 C. Day Lewis tr. Virgil's Aeneid ix. 203 You'll find no Atridae here, no double-talking Ulysses.
This is probably based on Orwell's newspeak and doublethink. His novel was (partly) a critique of the practice and propaganda of the totalitarian regimes of his time, Fascist Germany and Stalinist Russia.
Newspeak is new language invented by politicians as propaganda, in order to influence people's thinking by changing their language (one of the principal mechanisms studied by Postmodernist philosophers and sociologists). The word is invented by politicians in the novel and is an instance of itself. By drastically reducing vocabulary, and making new, simpler words from the remainder, they hoped to control the people more effectively. Many modern euphemisms could be called, and are often called, newspeak, like "differently abled" and "Secretary of Defence".
1949 ‘G. Orwell’ Nineteen Eighty-Four i. 51 Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. Ibid. ii. 133 Do you know the Newspeak word goodthinkful? Ibid. App. 299 Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing.
Doublethink is somewhat related to what modern psychology calls cognitive dissonance: first accepting one fact as true, then another, contradictory fact—without critical self-assessment, which would ordinarily result in elimination of one fact or the other. Orwell's politicians try to effect doublethink by means of using and propagating ambiguous language.
1949 ‘G. Orwell’ Nineteen Eighty-Four i. iii. 37 His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy.
Considering the change in meaning of double-talk soon after the publication of Orwell's novel, and the emergence of doublespeak to mean the same a few years later, your sources (reasonably) assume that the word was deliberately coined as a (semi-)portmanteau of Orwell's newspeak and doublethink. The OED has 1957 as its earliest quotation:
1957 ‘M. Buttle’ Sweeniad ii. 55 In the literary weeklies, the languages of criticism and theology have become one and book reviews all sound like sermons written in the most holy ‘*Double-Speak’.
1961 W. Kaufmann in G. E. Myers Self, Relig. & Metaphysics 99 The theologians have a way of redefining terms in rather odd ways, and frequently engage in something best called double-speak: their utterances are designed to communicate contradictory views to different listeners and readers.
The asterisk and quotation marks in the first quote might indicate that the word was then quite new and explained in a footnote.
The Oxford English Dictionary writes:
Originally in African-American usage: (as a general term of approval) admirable, excellent. Cf. hot adj. 12c. Popularized among jazz musicians and enthusiasts in the late 1940s
The first example they give is from the 1930s:
1933 Z. N. Hurston in Story Aug. 63 And whut make it so cool, he got money 'cumulated. And womens give it all to 'im.
The entry refers to hot as a comparison--the main entry is "Characterized by intensity or energy, in a positive or neutral sense (cf. sense A. 9); exciting, fast, successful, etc." and the related sense is:
colloq. (orig. U.S.). Extremely good, splendid; very skilled, knowledgeable, or successful. Also with on and a specified subject or activity.
This is first noted from the 1800s:
1845 in G. W. Harris High Times & Hard Times (1967) 52, I am a hot hand at the location of capital letters and punctuation.
So, it looks like cool developed to mean the same thing as the earlier slang hot in African American English. There is no explanation of why this occurred.
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Best Answer
Dictionary coverage of 'golliwog'
Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003) shows no hesitancy in declaring the source of the word golliwog:
That same dictionary has this entry—with a far less definite etymology—for wog:
Consistent with Merriam-Webster's reading of golliwog, Ernest Weekley, An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1921) has this entry for golliwog:
Weekley's only entry for golly, however, is as "Negro perversion of God." Weekley doesn't have an entry for wog at all.
Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, fourth edition (1966), has this for golliwog:
Like Weekley, Partridge in Origins doesn't have an entry for wog. But Eric Partridge, Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English, fifth edition (1961), has multiple entries for both. from the first edition (1937) of this dictionary Partridge has this entry for wog:
Regrettably, Partridge provides no guidance as to the meaning of babu here. The addenda section of the fifth edition of Slang and Unconventional English provides these interesting entries:
The upshot of all these instances of wog, golliwog, and gollywog is that they seem to owe their inspiration, ultimately, to the Golliwogg doll invented and drawn by Upton mère and fille between 1895 and 1910.
'Golliwog' and its variants in Google Books results
The Uptons' first Golliwogg book is The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a "Golliwogg" (1895), and the Golliwogg makes his initial appearance on page 24:
The illustrations, beginning on pages 23 and 24, depict the Golliwog as a sort of blackface Mr. Bill in a fright wig. Evidently these books were hugely popular both in North America and in Britain. Golliwog dolls were marketed in the United Sates and in the British Commonwealth, leading to discussions such as this one, from William Trowbridge, A Dazzling Reprobate (1906):
It begins to appear as a descriptive term in the same period. From Alfred Sutro, The Fascinating Mr. Vanderveldt: A Comedy in Four Acts (1907):
And one can see the beginnings of application of the term to dark-skinned human beings in this cartoon exchange between a mother and daughter from The Bystander (April 19, 1905), a London periodical:
"Golliwog" as a nickname is recorded in Ethel Younghusband, Glimpses of East Africa and Zanzibar (1910) [combine snippets]:
Finally we see the word golliwogs applied to native people of Zanzibar in The Nautical Magazine (1912) [combined snippets]:
Conclusions
All evidence points to the Uptons' Golliwogg books as the source of the term golliwog. Though initially a character in an illustrated children's book, the Golliwogg became even more popular in the West as an inexpensive doll, with black skin and wild hair. Google Books show instances of golliwog/gollywog being used as a descriptive term by 1907, and a nickname by 1910. Finally, the plural form golliwogs is applied to people of a certain ethnicity (ship hands from Zanzibar) by 1913.
I think it is extremely likely that the later slang term wog is simply a shortening of gollywog as applied to various dark-skinned people of Africa, the Near and Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent.