a wordDonut / doughnut
also: donut · doughnut
Both are correct and people still write in about it.
Two spellings of the same word. Doughnut is the older form and still dominates in print; donut is American, shorter, and on more signs.
First seen. 1809 (dough-nut, Washington Irving); 1900 (donut, George W. Peck)
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. Cited · wp-doughnut
The story Cited · wp-doughnut
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'".
The 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.
The particulars
| part of speech | noun |
|---|---|
| region | The United States |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
Who it runs with
Where we got it
- Doughnut — Wikipedia · link
Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.