Other forms: doughnuts
A doughnut is a sweet fried ring of dough, often glazed or sprinkled. A jam doughnut, a box of doughnuts, ring doughnut.
The hole is practical: without it the middle stays raw while the outside browns. The word is dough plus nut, from the small nut-sized balls the first ones were, before the ring shape took over. Note the American spelling donut, which is a twentieth-century shortening.
1noundoughnutA sweet fried ring of dough.
“He bought a bag of warm, sugary doughnuts at the fair.”
doughnut is a baked good.
Also accepted in games: donut
Dough plus nut, from 1809, when the cakes were small nut-sized balls of fried dough. The ring shape came later.
From dough + nut. 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.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA