How did donuts get their name?!


Question:

How did donuts get their name?

My dad believes that it was named after the nut that goes on a screw. I have to prove him wrong.


Answers:
Etymology

Oliebollen (Dutch doughnut or "Olykoeks")Washington Irving's reference to "doughnuts" in 1809 in his History of New York is an early printed use of the word. Irving described "balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog's fat, and called doughnuts, or olykoeks."[2] These "nuts" of fried dough might now be called doughnut holes. "Doughnut" is the more traditional spelling, and still dominates outside the US. At present, "donut" and "doughnut" are both pervasive in American English. The first known printed use of "donut" was in a Los Angeles Times article dated August 10, 1929. There, Bailey Millard jokingly complains about the decline of spelling, and that he "can't swallow the 'wel-dun donut' nor the ever so 'gud bred'." The interchangeability of the two spellings can be found in a series of "National Donut Week" articles in The New York Times that covered the 1939 World's Fair. In four articles beginning October 9, two mention the "donut" spelling. Dunkin' Donuts, which was founded in 1948 under the name Open Kettle (Quincy, Massachusetts), is the oldest surviving company to use the "donut" variation, but the now defunct Mayflower Donut Corporation appears to be the first company to use that spelling, having done so prior to World War II.


A doughnut, or donut, is a sweet deep-fried piece of dough or batter. The two most common types are the torus-shaped ring doughnut, and the filled doughnut, a flattened sphere injected with jam/jelly, cream, custard, or another sweet filling. A small spherical piece of dough, originally made from the middle of a ring doughnut, can be cooked as a doughnut hole. Doughnuts are usually fried, but in rare cases the dough is squeezed into a ball and rested between the rims of an electric cooker.

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/donuts...

ya know that is a really interesting question..............hmmmmmmm...

because there made from doe (bread doe) and theyre shaped like Nuts (bolts) thus do-nuts

The doughnut came to us from the eighteenth century Dutch of New Amsterdam and were referred to as olykoeks, meaning oily cakes. In the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Gregory fried flavored dough with walnuts for her son Hanson Gregory, hence the name doughnut. By the late nineteenth century, the doughnut had a hole.


If you want to read more about its origin............

Doughnuts were a great favorite at lumbering camps of the Midwest and Northwest as they were easy to make and full of calories needed to provide quick energy for arduous logging jobs. "Doughboys" of World War I ate thousands of doughnuts served up by the Salvation Army on the French front. Soldiers reminisced that the doughnut was far more than a hot snack. The doughnut represented all the men were fighting for―the safety and comfort of mother, hearth, and home.

Soon after the doughboys returned, dough-nut shops flourished. A Russian immigrant named Levitt invented a doughnut machine in 1920 that automatically pushed dough into shaped rings. By 1925, the invention earned him $25 million a year and it was a fixture in bakeries across the country. The machine-made doughnut was a hit of the 1934 World's Fair. Other machinery quickly developed for everything from mixing to frying. Franchises soon followed. By 1937, Krispy Kreme was founded on a "secret recipe" for yeast-raised doughnuts and Dunkin' Donuts (currently the franchise that sells the most doughnuts worldwide) was founded in Massachusetts. Presently, Krispy Kreme totals 147 stores in 26 states, while Dunkin' Donuts has 5,000 franchises in the United States and is present in 37 countries.

Donuts used to be spelled Dough Naughts
Dough cause they're made from dough and
Naughts cause they're shaped like zeroes (zero is another word for naught)




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