doughnut
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈdəʊˌnʌt/
ipa: /ˈdəʊ.nət/
ipa: /ˈdoʊˌnʌt/
ipa: /ˈdoʊ.nət/
rhymes: -oʊnət
homophone: donut
Forms: form: doughnuts
form: doughnutting
form: doughnuting
form: doughnutted
form: doughnutted
form: doughnuted
form: doughnuted
form: donut
form: dough-nut
Etymology: 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.
Senses: examples: text: […] even the notorious ‘doughnuting’ (gathering around the Member speaking) appears to have fallen out of fashion.
ref: 1995, F[rederick] F[ernand] Ridley, Michael Rush, editors, British Government and Politics Since 1945: Changes in Perspective, New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 163:
text: My body flew like a rag doll as he relentlessly and with purpose kept doughnuting the car in wilder circles.
ref: 2003, April Smith, Good Morning, Killer, New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, →ISBN, page 341:
text: Press people doughnutted around him.
ref: 2003, New Statesman, page 48:
text: At 12.30 in the afternoon – half-an-hour earlier and she could have been accused of perpetrating an April Fool’s swansong deception – Hughes stood up in the Commons, doughnutted by as ugly a bunch of sad or scowling Blair babes as you could gather.
ref: 2004, Steve Moxon, “Storyline: Bev Gets Knotted”, in The Great Immigration Scandal, Imprint Academic, →ISBN, page 195:
text: The desiccated scoreboard flag wiggled atop an Impala that doughnutted the fifty-yard line.
ref: 2009, Jamie Iredell, Prose. Poems. A Novel., Orange Alert Press, →ISBN, page 27:
text: Ms Lumley’s co-campaigners were behind him, and had arranged it so there were pictures of injured Gurkhas behind each of his ears. What a terrible fate for any politician, to be doughnutted by hideous lacerations!
ref: 2009 May 8, Simon Hoggart, Send Up the Clowns: Parliamentary Sketches 2007–2011, Guardian Books, published 2011, →ISBN:
text: In the early days of the broadcasting, the whips would see to it that their front-bench speaker was ‘doughnutted’, surrounded by eagerly attentive supporters.
ref: 2012, Ferdinand Mount, The New Few, or A Very British Oligarchy, Simon & Schuster, →ISBN:
text: Then there is the clustering around questioners and speakers, with more nodding and general harrumphing, in full camera shot. The minority parties take this ‘doughnuting’ particularly seriously, often rushing members into the Chamber to fill a camera angle in order to give the appearance of massed strength, especially important when the clip is shown in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.
ref: 2012, Tony Wright, Doing Politics, London: Biteback Publishing, →ISBN:
text: The historical precedent may be Henry II and Thomas Becket: “Oh who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” Or, in the Schama edition, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?”⁵⁶ Despite my doubts that even 12⁵² century kings spoke like this, dub judge for cleric and it sits easily in a vision of Cameron doughnutted by his cabal.
ref: 2012, Twelve Big Lies and the Prairies of Heaven, or The Curse of the Ceteris Paribus, Bloomsbury Reader, →ISBN:
text: My blood still boils when I watch, in television replays, my grimaces of anger immediately behind Geoffrey Howe as he delivered his resignation statement in which I was ‘doughnutted’ by the cameras. […] By coincidence, I was sitting on the fourth bench below the gangway immediately behind Sir Geoffrey Howe as he delivered his resignation statement. This meant that I was ‘doughnutted’ in the television pictures of virtually every word he uttered.
ref: 2013, Jonathan Aitken, Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Continuum, →ISBN, pages 7 (Prologue) and 619 (End Game):
text: But when President Ford walked along a corridor from the conference room to get a cup of coffee, he was doughnutted by a scrummage of twenty worried bodyguards, flattening delegates from other nations against the wall and interrogating them if they failed to display a pass. […] Secret Service secret agents spoke up their sleeves to a control room – then doughnutted around him in close protective formation.
ref: 2015, John Warwicker, An Outsider Inside No 10: Protecting the Prime Ministers, 1974–79, The History Press, →ISBN:
text: A couple of other supporters had doughnutted round him.
ref: 2015, Quentin Letts, The Speaker’s Wife, Constable, →ISBN:
text: In another stunt, to protest against the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, Hannan and other Oxford Eurosceptics ‘doughnutted’ Norman Lamont, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, at a Europhile meeting in Bath – that is, they surrounded him, to give the impression to the television cameras that there were many more protesters than there actually were.
ref: 2017, Harry Mount, Summer Madness: How Brexit Split the Tories, Destroyed Labour and Divided the Country, Biteback Publishing, →ISBN:
text: The reshuffle was awful. Chris Grayling for Ken Clarke [as Lord Chancellor]. Hunt to Health. Owen Paterson to Environment. Cable doughnutted, surrounded by Tories in his own department.
ref: 2021, Alastair Campbell, Alastair Campbell Diaries, Volume 8: Rise and Fall of the Olympic Spirit, 2010–2015, Biteback Publishing, →ISBN:
glosses: To encircle something.
Related terms: bagel
koulouri