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There’s no doubt that doughty has persevered in the English language—it’s traceable all the way back to the Old English word dohtig—but how to pronounce it? One might assume that doughty should be pronounced \DAW-tee\, paralleling similarly spelled words like bought and sought, or perhaps with a long o, as in dough. But the vowel sound in doughty is the same as in doubt, and in fact, over the centuries, doughty’s spelling was sometimes confused with that of the now obsolete word doubty (“full of doubt”), which could be the reason we have the pronunciation we use today. The homophonous dowdy (“having a dull or uninteresting appearance”) can also be a source of confusion; an easy way to remember the difference is that you can’t spell doughty without the letters in tough (“physically and emotionally strong”).
Synonyms
Examples of doughty in a Sentence
Alison Willmore, Vulture, 12 Feb. 2024
The campaign also exposed the vacuum in our political press corps, which tried valiantly to prop up the Florida governor as a doughty maverick who shouldn’t be underestimated.
—Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 22 Jan. 2024
And along with the doughty swarm of small organizations that keep New York’s music scene varied and vibrant, the Perelman Center makes its entrance as an opera presenter, staging one of the season’s two Huang Ruo works.
—Vulture, 5 Jan. 2024
The doughty American consumer led the way, with personal consumption growing 4% and contributing about 2.7 percentage points to overall growth.
—The Editorial Board, WSJ, 26 Oct. 2023
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Dictionary Entries Near doughty
Cite this Entry
“Doughty.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doughty. Accessed 26 Nov. 2024.
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