Doe

How to spell doe

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce doe

What does doe mean?

1. nounA female deer, or the female of related animals such as the rabbit and hare.

Doe in a sentence

• A doe and her fawn stepped out of the woodland at dawn.

• The hunter lowered his rifle because the animal was a doe rather than a stag.

Where does doe come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Doe comes from the Old English word da, which named a female deer and especially the female of the fallow or roe deer. The Old English form has no certain relatives in the other early Germanic languages, so its deeper origin is genuinely obscure; some scholars have suggested a link to a Celtic or pre-Germanic word for deer, but this remains unproven. The spelling settled into its modern three-letter shape with a silent final e during the Middle English period, the same era that fixed the matching word buck for the male animal. Because doe sounds exactly like dough, the bread mixture, and like the musical note doh, the trap for a writer is purely the spelling: the deer is the plain d-o-e. The word also survives in the familiar phrase doe-eyed, describing large, gentle eyes, and in the name of a young female rabbit or hare, which is likewise called a doe.

How the word is built

• doe (single root; from Old English da, a female deer); no prefix or suffix

Words that sound like doe

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• dough: A thick, soft mixture of flour and liquid that is kneaded and baked into bread, pastry, or similar foods.