From a dialectal variant of houden(“to keep”) +touw(“rope”). A neologism that first appeared in August 2004, after winning a contest of Het Vlaams Centrum voor Volkscultuur (The Flemish Centre for Folk Culture) that aimed to find a native Dutch word for English keycord. The word, while still used, never gained widespread usage, with sleutelkoord, a literal translation of English keycord, now being the common word.