A mechanism for dispersion to automatically arise from the dispersionless Whitham Modulation equations (WMEs) is presented, relying on the use of a moving frame. The speed of this is chosen to be one of the characteristics which emerge from the linearization of the Whitham system, and assuming these are real (and thus the WMEs are hyperbolic) morphs the WMEs into the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation in the boosted coordinate. Strikingly, the coefficients of the KdV equation are universal, in the sense that they are determined by abstract properties of the original Lagrangian density. Two illustrative examples of the theory are given to illustrate how the KdV may be constructed in practice. The first being a revisitation of the derivation of the KdV equation from shallow water flows, to highlight how the theory of this paper fits into the existing literature. The second is a complex Klein–Gordon system, providing a case where the KdV equation may only arise with the use of a moving frame.