All About Donuts: Origin, Correct Spelling, Dunkin Donuts Founded

 As a Dunkin' Donuts coffee fanatic, and a lover of Double chocolate and Boston Cream Dunkin Donuts, I thought I would share this great history of the word donut (Courtesy of Dictionary. com) and where the pastry originated from.

WHAT IS A DONUT/DOUGHNUT?  Small sweetened or unsweetened pieces of dough fried in deep fat. As for the spelling: is it doughnut or donut? Technically, it can be both. Dictionaries and popular style guides like the AP Stylebook list doughnut as the preferred spelling. However, donut is a common variation in the United States.

WHERE DID THE "NUT" COME FROM? The word doughnut was first recorded at the end of the 1700s with the spelling donote. It’s just one example of how the English language has changed over time—and an example of how messy spelling has always been when it comes to English. And words with -ough spellings can be especially rough, like through, tough, drought, cough, and others.

Doughnut, of course, is a compound of dough and nut. But why nut? There are a couple lines of thinking as to how the nut part of the word came to be. One is that nut, here, is likened to a small lump of dough. The other is related to literal nuts, and traces the sweets back to a woman named Elizabeth Gregory who made deep-fried dough with cinnamon and nutmeg and put hazelnuts or walnuts in the middle. The nuts filled the space where the dough wouldn’t cook all the way through—a solution before the middle was taken out of doughnuts entirely.

THEY CAME FROM THE DUTCH! They came from Dutch settlers who lived in what was then known as New Amsterdam. The settlers brought what they called olykoeks, which translates to “oily cakes.” From a literal perspective, it made sense: cakes fried in oil.

WHO PUT THE NUT IN DONUT? Elizabeth Gregory, the woman who has been credited with the nuts in doughnuts, also plays a role in how doughnuts got their hole. According to legend, her son, Captain Hansen Gregory, put a hole in the middle of the fried piece of dough. Cutting out the middle meant that the inside would cook evenly alongside the exterior, so the story goes, though there are other stories about how it also allowed Captain Gregory to put his doughnuts on the spokes of a ship’s wheel, and others that say he did it to make the doughnuts easier to digest.

ROARING 20s, 30s AND 40s DONUTS - Doughnut machines pumped out commercial versions in New York City as early as 1920, and Americans fighting in the trenches of World War I were given doughnuts to give them a taste of home (soldiers at the time were often called doughboys, but that had to do with the buttons on their uniform rather than doughnuts). The Chicago World’s Fair in 1934 featured doughnuts as a cheap and tasty dish. During World War II, women who worked in the Red Cross delivered doughnuts, which earned them the nickname “Doughnut Dollies.”

HOW DID DUNKIN DONUTS START? In my hometown of Quincy, Massachusetts (before I was born). William Rosenberg opened Open Kettle in 1948, a restaurant selling donuts and coffee in Quincy, Massachusetts, but he changed the name in 1950 to Dunkin' Donuts after discussing with company executives. ... The restaurant was successful, and Rosenberg sold franchises to others starting in 1955.