dough

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English

Navy bakers knead, cut, whip, and roll dough

Alternative forms

Etymology

From Middle English dow, dogh, dagh, from Old English dāg, from Proto-Germanic *daigaz (“dough”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeyǵʰ- (“to knead, form, mold”). Cognate with Scots daich, dauch, doach (“dough”), West Frisian daai (“dough”), Dutch deeg (“dough”), Low German Deeg (“dough”), German Teig (“dough”), Norwegian Bokmål deig (“dough”), Danish dej (“dough”), Swedish deg (“dough”), Icelandic deig (“dough”).

The derivation of the second meaning (of money) is obscure, but dates to the mid 19th century.

Pronunciation

Noun

dough (usually uncountable, plural doughs)

  1. A thick, malleable substance made by mixing flour with other ingredients such as water, eggs, and/or butter, that is made into a particular form and then baked.
    Pizza dough is very stretchy.
  2. (slang, somewhat dated) money
    His mortgage payments left him short on dough.
    • 1906, O. Henry, “From the Cabby's Seat”, in The Four Million, page 170:
      "I want to see four dollars before goin' any further on th' thrip. Have ye got th' dough?"
    • 1976 September, Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York, N.Y.: Avon Books, →ISBN, page 377:
      I am astonished, really astonished, that you didn't put away some dough. You must be bananas.
    • 2021 January 13, Gillian Friedman, “Jobless, Selling Nudes Online and Still Struggling”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:
      “It is already an incredibly saturated market,” Ms. Jones said of explicit content online. “The idea that people are just going to open up an OnlyFans account and start raking in the dough is really misguided.”
  3. (US military slang, countable) clipping of doughboy, infantryman

Derived terms

Translations

Verb

dough (third-person singular simple present doughs, present participle doughing, simple past and past participle doughed)

  1. (transitive) To make into dough.
    The flour was doughed with a suitable quantity of water.

Derived terms

References

  • Lighter, Jonathan (1972) “The Slang of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, 1917-1919: An Historical Glossary”, in American Speech‎, volume 47, number 1/2, page 44

Further reading

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