{
 "id": "donut-spelling",
 "type": "term",
 "names": {
  "name": "Donut / doughnut",
  "aliases": [
   "donut",
   "doughnut"
  ],
  "said": "Both are correct and people still write in about it."
 },
 "region": [
  "us"
 ],
 "facets": {
  "letter": "D",
  "part_of_speech": "noun"
 },
 "text": {
  "what": "Two spellings of the same word. Doughnut is the older form and still dominates in print; donut is American, shorter, and on more signs.",
  "story": "The first known printed use of donut is in George W. Peck's Peck's Bad Boy and his Pa, 1900: a character drinks a cup of coffee and eats a donut. John T. Edge writes that the short spelling was invented in the 1920s by the New York-based Display Doughnut Machine Corporation, which cut the word to make it easier for the foreign buyers it hoped would buy its machines. A Los Angeles Times piece of 10 August 1929 has Bailey Millard complaining he cannot swallow \"the 'wel-dun donut'\".\n\nThe two ran side by side for decades: The New York Times used both across a series of \"National Donut Week\" articles covering the 1939 World's Fair. Dunkin' — Open Kettle in 1948, renamed in 1950 — is the oldest surviving company using the short form. Krispy Kreme, per Oxford, is the notable exception that keeps the long one."
 },
 "kin": [
  {
   "to": "hole",
   "as": "The other thing everyone argues about.",
   "rel": "term"
  },
  {
   "to": "dunkin",
   "as": "The company that carried the short spelling.",
   "rel": "org"
  }
 ],
 "sources": [
  "s:wp-doughnut"
 ],
 "provenance": {
  "default": {
   "tier": "cited",
   "source": "s:wp-doughnut"
  },
  "fields": {
   "names.said": {
    "tier": "tradition"
   }
  }
 },
 "schema": 1,
 "confidence": "high",
 "updated": "2026-09-16",
 "etymology": {
  "root": "dough + nut, where nut carries the older sense of a small rounded cake or cookie, as in ginger nut",
  "first_attested": "1809 (dough-nut, Washington Irving); 1900 (donut, George W. Peck)",
  "note": "John T. Edge attributes the short spelling to the Display Doughnut Machine Corporation in the 1920s, shortened so foreign buyers of its machines could pronounce it.",
  "tier": "cited",
  "source": "s:wp-doughnut"
 },
 "blurb": "Two spellings of the same word. Doughnut is the older form and still dominates in print; donut is American, shorter, and on more signs.",
 "region_terms": [
  {
   "key": "us",
   "name": "The United States",
   "state": null,
   "note": "use when a node belongs to the whole country"
  }
 ],
 "kin_out": [
  {
   "to": "hole",
   "type": "term",
   "name": "The hole",
   "as": "The other thing everyone argues about.",
   "rel": "term"
  },
  {
   "to": "dunkin",
   "type": "org",
   "name": "Dunkin'",
   "as": "The company that carried the short spelling.",
   "rel": "org"
  }
 ],
 "source_list": [
  {
   "id": "s:wp-doughnut",
   "kind": "web",
   "title": "Doughnut — Wikipedia",
   "publisher": "Wikipedia",
   "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut",
   "accessed": "2026-09-16",
   "license": "CC BY-SA 4.0"
  }
 ],
 "tiers": {
  "text.what": {
   "tier": "cited",
   "source": "s:wp-doughnut"
  },
  "text.story": {
   "tier": "cited",
   "source": "s:wp-doughnut"
  },
  "etymology": {
   "tier": "cited",
   "source": "s:wp-doughnut"
  }
 },
 "primary_image": null,
 "tag_facts": [],
 "recognition_facts": [],
 "acclaim": 0,
 "kin_in": [
  {
   "from": "dunkin",
   "type": "org",
   "name": "Dunkin'",
   "as": "The spelling it carried.",
   "rel": "term"
  }
 ]
}