dough
noun · verb
Simple meaning
A thick, malleable substance made by mixing flour with other ingredients such as water, eggs.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
dohIPA pronunciation (US)
ˈdoʊ
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
A thick, malleable substance made by mixing flour with other ingredients such as water, eggs, or butter, that is made into a particular form and then baked.
slang
Money.
verb
transitive
To make into dough.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B2 · Upper Intermediate
- Frequency
- Moderately Common
- Typical Use
- Neutral / general English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: A thick, malleable substance made by mixing flour with other ingredients such as water, eggs, or butter, that is made into a particular form and then baked.
Used this way, dough is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Moderate
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use dough
- “Pizza dough is very stretchy.”noun
- “Hey Martin, we are playing a hold'em card game for some dough, would you like to join?”noun
- “The flour was doughed with a suitable quantity of water.”verb
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
Any of various doughs for bread.
A dough of flour and water and shortening.
Related words
Connected by subject or meaning, not by word formation.
Made with a starter of a small amount of dough in which fermentation is active.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.