doughnut

Etymology

From dough + nut, 1809 because originally small, nut-sized balls of fried dough, or, more likely, from nut in the earlier sense of "small rounded cake or cookie", with the toroidal shape becoming common in the twentieth century. First attested in Knickerbocker’s History of New York, by Washington Irving, 1809.

noun

1. A deep-fried piece of dough or batter, commonly of a toroidal (a ring doughnut) shape, often mixed with various sweeteners and flavourings; or flattened sphere (a filled doughnut) shape filled with jam, custard or cream.
   The soldiers, drawn up in hollow square—how apt is this word hollow, when applied to men who have fasted, in view of promised doughnuts!—received the procession, which consisted of music, then the ladies, then the doughnuts. 1865, Frank B. Goodrich, The Tribute Book, Derby & Miller, page 45
   One American student sought my help to take the work further in his school science project, in which he studied how doughnuts differ from cookies. 2003, Len Fisher, How to Dunk a Doughnut, U.S. edition, Arcade Publishing, page 2
   2018, Karen Scott, Margaret Webb, Clare Kostelnick, Long-Term Caring: Residential, Home and Community Aged Care, 4th Edition, Australia and New Zealand Edition, Elsevier Australia, page 227, The prostate gland lies just below the bladder and is shaped like a doughnut.
2. Anything in the shape of a torus.
   1. (attributive) A circular life raft.
      He put on the life jacket and began paddling around. A doughnut life raft popped up out of the ocean in front of him. 1996, John Long, Close Shaves: Classic Stories on the Edge, page 2
   2. (physics) A toroidal vacuum chamber.
      In about 1951, the same company sealed into their vacuum doughnuts the regenerative peelers so that X-ray beams or electron beams could be obtained with the sealed off commercial tubes used in […] 2012, Edward Creutz, Nuclear Instrumentation I, page 213
   3. (Canada, US) A peel-out or skid mark in the shape of a circle; a 360-degree skid.
   4. A spare car tyre, usually stored in the boot, that is smaller than a full-sized tyre and is only intended for temporary use.
   5. A kind of tyre for an airplane.
      The advantage of the doughnuts was that they spread the weight of the aeroplane over a much larger area of ground, causing less damage to grass, and making them less prone to bogging down in wet conditions. 1975, Flight International (volume 107, part 2)
3. (slang) A vulva; (by extension) a woman's virginity.
   When I was at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art . . . there was a lady student there — and I had designs on her doughnut 1993, Ken Campbell, Pigspurt, Or, Six Pigs from Happiness
   My mother was sixteen when she lost her doughnut. Said she waited till she was legal. She was itching to do it she said. 1994, Plays International - Volume 10, page 39
   Girl, now you've reached puberty Your doughnut should cover itself With curly hair, with soft hair. 1997, Josiane Racine, Viramma, Life of an Untouchable, page 33
   Make my jelly roll with your doughnut hole. 2008, Diana Skylar, Seduction, page 155
   The bearded clan's men approaches in order to munch the carpet, kiss the kitten, and suck the wet doughnut! You open your legs wide showing the view that makes me drool! 2012, Ole Eddie Kane The Next Generation, Moments and Fantasies, page 38
4. (Britain, colloquial) A foolish or stupid person.
   You fucking doughnut, of course you don't microwave a salad! 2012, Gordon Ramsay, Kitchen Nightmares "Michons"

verb

1. Encircle.
   Press people doughnutted around him. 2003, New Statesman, page 48
   At 12.30 in the afternoon – half-an-hour earlier and she could have been accused of perpetrating an April Fool’s swansong deception – Hughes stood up in the Commons, doughnutted by as ugly a bunch of sad or scowling Blair babes as you could gather. 2004, Steve Moxon, “Storyline: Bev Gets Knotted”, in The Great Immigration Scandal, Imprint Academic, page 195
   The desiccated scoreboard flag wiggled atop an Impala that doughnutted the fifty-yard line. 2009, Jamie Iredell, Prose. Poems. A Novel., Orange Alert Press, page 27
   Ms Lumley’s co-campaigners were behind him, and had arranged it so there were pictures of injured Gurkhas behind each of his ears. What a terrible fate for any politician, to be doughnutted by hideous lacerations! 8 May 2009, Simon Hoggart, Send Up the Clowns: Parliamentary Sketches 2007–2011, Guardian Books, published 2011
   In the early days of the broadcasting, the whips would see to it that their front-bench speaker was ‘doughnutted’, surrounded by eagerly attentive supporters. 2012, Ferdinand Mount, The New Few, or A Very British Oligarchy, Simon & Schuster
   The historical precedent may be Henry II and Thomas Becket: “Oh who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” Or, in the Schama edition, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?”⁵⁶ Despite my doubts that even 12⁵² century kings spoke like this, dub judge for cleric and it sits easily in a vision of Cameron doughnutted by his cabal. 2012, Twelve Big Lies and the Prairies of Heaven, or The Curse of the Ceteris Paribus, Bloomsbury Reader
   My blood still boils when I watch, in television replays, my grimaces of anger immediately behind Geoffrey Howe as he delivered his resignation statement in which I was ‘doughnutted’ by the cameras. […] By coincidence, I was sitting on the fourth bench below the gangway immediately behind Sir Geoffrey Howe as he delivered his resignation statement. This meant that I was ‘doughnutted’ in the television pictures of virtually every word he uttered. 2013, Jonathan Aitken, Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Continuum, pages 7 (Prologue) and 619 (End Game)
   But when President Ford walked along a corridor from the conference room to get a cup of coffee, he was doughnutted by a scrummage of twenty worried bodyguards, flattening delegates from other nations against the wall and interrogating them if they failed to display a pass. […] Secret Service secret agents spoke up their sleeves to a control room – then doughnutted around him in close protective formation. 2015, John Warwicker, An Outsider Inside No 10: Protecting the Prime Ministers, 1974–79, The History Press
   A couple of other supporters had doughnutted round him. 2015, Quentin Letts, The Speaker’s Wife, Constable
   In another stunt, to protest against the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, Hannan and other Oxford Eurosceptics ‘doughnutted’ Norman Lamont, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, at a Europhile meeting in Bath – that is, they surrounded him, to give the impression to the television cameras that there were many more protesters than there actually were. 2017, Harry Mount, Summer Madness: How Brexit Split the Tories, Destroyed Labour and Divided the Country, Biteback Publishing
   The reshuffle was awful. Chris Grayling for Ken Clarke [as Lord Chancellor]. Hunt to Health. Owen Paterson to Environment. Cable doughnutted, surrounded by Tories in his own department. 2021, Alastair Campbell, Alastair Campbell Diaries, Volume 8: Rise and Fall of the Olympic Spirit, 2010–2015, Biteback Publishing