Dough is the soft mix of flour and water you knead before baking. Knead the dough, let the dough rise, bread dough.
Kneading develops gluten, which is what traps the gas and lets bread rise, and resting the dough does much of that work by itself. Dough is thick enough to knead where batter is pourable, which is the whole distinction. Dough is also old slang for money. Note that the word is Old English and its root means to knead.
1noundoughThe soft mix of flour and water you knead before baking.
“Roll the dough out thinly before you cut it into shapes.”
Patternmake / knead / roll out the dough · bread / pizza / cookie dough · the dough rises · a ball of dough
2nounmoneyMoney, in old slang.
“He's making a lot of dough from his new business.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
dough is a mixture.
DOUGH → said like GO
It is said like go, not like cow: the soft white mix you press with your hands before it becomes bread.
hooks ontogo
Old English dag comes from a root meaning to knead or form. Lady, from a word meaning loaf-kneader, comes from the same root.
Middle English
dogh
English, today
dough
From Middle English dogh. From Middle English dow, dogh, dagh, from Old English dāg, from Proto-Germanic daigaz (“dough”), from Proto-Indo-European dʰeyǵʰ- (“to knead, form, mold”). Cognate with Scots daich, dauch, doach (“dough”), frr dii, Jai (“dough”), West Frisian daai (“dough”), Dutch deeg (“dough”), German Teig (“dough”), Low German and lb Deeg (“dough”), wym taag (“dough”), Yiddish טייג (“dough”), Danish dej (“dough”), Faroese deiggj (“dough”), Icelandic, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk deig (“dough”), Swedish deg (“dough”), Gothic 𐌳𐌰𐌹𐌲𐍃 (“dough”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA