Doughnut

How to spell doughnut

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce doughnut

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does doughnut mean?

1. nounA small sweet cake of fried dough, often ring-shaped or filled with jam or cream.

Doughnut in a sentence

• She dunked a sugared doughnut into her morning coffee.

• The bakery sells a jam-filled doughnut for a pound each.

Where does doughnut come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word is a simple compound of two ordinary English words, 'dough' and 'nut'. 'Dough', from the Old English dag, has always meant the soft, kneaded paste of flour and water that becomes bread once baked, while 'nut' here is used in its old sense of a small rounded lump rather than the seed of a tree. The name first appears in early nineteenth-century America, describing little fried balls of sweetened dough that were roughly the size and shape of a nut. The familiar ring shape, with its hole punched out for even frying, came slightly later, but the name stuck. The clipped American spelling 'donut' grew popular in the twentieth century through brand names and signage, yet the older 'doughnut' remains the full, standard form and preserves the visible 'dough' that explains exactly what the treat is made of.

How the word is built

• dough (a mixture of flour and liquid)
• nut (small rounded lump)