Bagel

How to spell bagel

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bagel

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bagel mean?

1. nounA dense, ring-shaped bread roll that is boiled and then baked.

Bagel in a sentence

• She toasted a bagel and spread it with cream cheese.

• The cafe sells a fresh bagel with smoked salmon every morning.

Where does bagel come from?

Language of origin: Other

Bagel comes from the Yiddish word beygl, the name for a dense, ring-shaped bread roll that is boiled before it is baked. The Yiddish form descends from a Middle High German word bouc, meaning 'ring' or 'bracelet', which is related to the old Germanic verb meaning 'to bend', the same family that gives English the words 'bow' and 'bagel's' round shape. The food and its name travelled with Ashkenazi Jewish communities across Central and Eastern Europe, and the bagel became a fixture of Jewish bakeries in cities such as Krakow and Warsaw. English picked the word up in the early twentieth century, chiefly through Jewish immigrants in New York and other North American cities, with the spelling settling as 'bagel' to match the way it sounds. The single 'g' and the soft '-el' ending are the usual spelling snag, since writers sometimes reach for a doubled letter or an '-le' ending out of habit.

How the word is built

• bagel (single unit, from Yiddish beygl 'ring-shaped roll'); no separable prefix or suffix