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PlainSpell

dough

/doʊ/noun, verb

dough is spelled D-O-U-G-H: 5 letters and one syllable. It appears 7.2 times per million words in written English, the 8,784th most frequent word form (wordfreq, 2021 data). As a noun, dough means “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…” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). The plural of dough is doughs.

How many letters and syllables are in dough?

Letters5: D-O-U-G-H
Syllables1 (from its American pronunciation)
In writing7.2 times per million words; the 8,784th most frequent word form
Wrong spellings searchednone measured in search
Pairs people search
Sounds like
Rhymes with

Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media); Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026); rhymes and same-letter words are computed by PlainSpell from its own word list.

How common is dough?

Dough appears 7.2 times per million words in written English, the 8,784th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

How do you pronounce dough?

  • UK /dəʊ/
  • US /doʊ/
  • US [ˈdö̞ʷʊ̯ʷ]

Dough has one syllable (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-uk-dough.ogg, En-us-dough.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Words people confuse with dough

Word pairs people search, with the monthly searches for “a vs b” (G: Google, B: Bing, United States).

door vs dough0 B

Sounds like: d'oh, doe, doh (Wiktionary's homophone list; some hold only in some accents).

Also written: doughboy, dow.

Sources: Google and Bing searches (September 2025 to August 2026, through DataForSEO); English Wiktionary (homophones, alternative spellings).

What rhymes with dough?

The 12 most written words on PlainSpell end in the same sounds as dough from its last stressed vowel (/oʊ/):

Computed by PlainSpell from the pronunciations in the English Wiktionary (dump of September 2, 2026): a rhyme shares every sound from the last stressed vowel to the end; ordered by written frequency (wordfreq 3.1).

Forms of dough

  • doughs plural, present, singular, he/she/it
  • dow
  • doff
  • duff
  • doughing participle, present
  • doughed participle, past

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

What does dough mean?

The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).

noun

  1. 1

    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.

    Pizza dough is very stretchy.

  2. 2

    slangMoney.

    His mortgage payments left him short on dough.

  3. 3

    USslangClipping of doughboy (“an infantryman”).

verb

  1. 1

    To make into dough.

    The flour was doughed with a suitable quantity of water.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

Dough in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Frenchpâte (mix of flour and other ingredients), fric, oseille, galette, pognon, blé (money (slang))
GermanTeig (mix of flour and other ingredients), Knete, Kohle (money (slang))
Portuguesemassa, pasta (mix of flour and other ingredients), grana (money (slang))
Spanishmasa, pasta, amasijo, amasadura, textal (teshtal), pella (mix of flour and other ingredients)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does dough come from?

From Middle English dow, dogh, dagh, from Old English dāg, from Proto-Germanic *daigaz (“dough”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeyǵʰ- (“to knead, form, mold”).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

What to look up after dough