about the name

Why “dottr”?

If you searched “dottr” hoping for the old Norse word, you’re not wrong — it’s a real one. Here’s that story, and how a QR tool ended up with the same name.

The Old Norse bit

In Old Norse, dóttr (more fully dóttir) means “daughter”. It runs all the way back through Proto-Germanic duhtēr to the Proto-Indo-European root *dʰugh₂tḗr — the same ancient word that gives us the English daughter and the German Tochter.

You’ll know it best from Icelandic names. Icelanders don’t pass down a fixed family surname; they build it from the parent’s first name plus -son (“son of”) or -dóttir (“daughter of”). So Björn’s daughter is Björnsdóttir, and his son is Björnsson. If that’s what you came looking for — welcome, and now you know it’s alive and well in every phone book in Reykjavík.

So what’s this dottr?

This one is a small, free tool for making QR codes. The name has nothing to do with daughters and everything to do with dots — a QR code is really just a tidy grid of little dark squares, and “dottr” is our slightly playful spelling of the thing that draws them. Paste a link, get a clean pattern of dots, download it. That’s genuinely it.

Not the tap-to-share “dot” cards, either

There’s an unrelated product called Dot that sells NFC business cards. We’re not them. dottr is a generator that runs entirely in your browser — no card to buy, no login, no cookies, nothing leaves your device. You can even keep a little wallet of your own codes on your phone to show people.

Since you’re here…

Whether you came for etymology or by accident, you may as well leave with something useful: a crisp QR code for your link, WiFi, or contact details, made in about ten seconds.

Make one at dottr → It’s free, and — fittingly for a word this old — it works offline.