Dough

How to spell dough

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dough

What does dough mean?

1. nounA thick, soft mixture of flour and liquid that is kneaded and baked into bread, pastry, or similar foods.
2. nounAn informal term for money.

Dough in a sentence

• She kneaded the dough until it was smooth and elastic.

• They made serious dough selling handmade furniture online.

• The recipe says to let the dough rise in a warm place for an hour.

• The new contract brought in enough dough to cover the mortgage.

Where does dough come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English dāg, which meant a kneaded mass of flour and liquid, and it can be traced back to a Proto-Germanic root meaning 'to knead' or 'to form'. The same ancient root survives in related Germanic words such as the Dutch deeg and the German Teig, both still meaning dough today, and it is even distantly connected to the Latin fingere, 'to shape or mould'. The spelling is the real trap: the -ough cluster once represented a throaty consonant sound that English speakers gradually stopped pronouncing, leaving a silent ending that no longer matches how the word sounds. Because so many -ough words (through, though, cough, rough) are read in completely different ways, dough keeps an old spelling that gives no clue to its plain 'doh' pronunciation. The informal sense of dough meaning 'money' arose in American slang during the 1800s, playing on the idea of bread as a basic necessity of life.

How the word is built

• dough (from Old English dāg, 'kneaded mass'); the -ough spelling preserves an old guttural sound now silent

Words that sound like dough

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

• doe: A female deer, or the female of related animals such as the rabbit and hare.