[RINGING]
Hi.
It's Doug.
Are you a fan of donuts?
Well, I'm standing outside a donut shop near my house.
Look at the size of this.
Isn't that huge?
We got a question about donuts this week
from someone named Connell.
So let's give him a call now.
[RINGING]
Hi, Doug.
Hi, Connell.
I have a question for you.
How did donuts get their name?
That's a great question.
Why do we call donuts donuts?
To be honest, we could have called them anything.
We could have called them schmoop la doops.
Or we could have called them sassenfringles.
Fingal's
But no, we call them donuts.
Why?
Why donut?
What's so interesting about questions
like this is how do you figure out how anything came
to be called what it's called?
To solve this kind of mystery, there's a secret tool--
this thing.
It's awesome.
It's a special kind of book.
It's a kind of dictionary.
Now you might know that a dictionary is a book that
has every word in our language.
And you can look up any word.
And it tells you how to spell it and what that word means.
This thing is a special kind of dictionary.
It's called an etymology dictionary.
Now let me tell you what that means.
I wish it had a better name.
Etymology means the story of a word.
So this doesn't tell you what a word means.
Instead if you look up a word in this book,
it tells you the story of the word.
It tells you why we chose to call the word that word.
So what I can do is I can look up donut
in the etymology dictionary.
And here we get our first clue.
Now you might have seen donut spelled like this--
D-O-N-U-T, right?
That's how a lot of people spell it today.
But donut is sometimes spelled like this,
and this is how it used to be spelled.
Does that give you any clues?
Just by looking at the word, can you
tell where at least part of the word donut comes from?
Now would be a good time to pause
the video if you want to take a guess.
You ready?
Look at the first part of that word, the dough part
of the word doughnut.
You might have heard of dough before.
Donuts are made of dough.
It's the same stuff we use to make bread.
So that's the dough part.
But now what about the second part of that word, nut?
A donut doesn't look like a nut.
What's it got to do with a nut?
It seems like nothing.
But if you look in the etymology dictionary, it tells us.
Donuts weren't always a thing.
They were introduced from the Dutch,
a people who live in Europe, who called them olykoeks.
Now that's Dutch for oil cake.
It's dough that you fry in oil, which makes it become cake.
So you got oil cake.
Now that name didn't catch on for them.
So why would we start calling them donuts?
Well, notice what those original Dutch donuts looked like.
Do you notice how they don't have a hole in them, do they?
There's no hole.
We think of donuts as round with a hole in it.
I mean if it doesn't have that, it's not a donut, right?
But it turns out the hole came later.
You see, instead, donuts used to look like this,
a round glob of dough.
A lot of people thought that the shape of this
looked like a nut, almost like an almond.
So the name became donut because it's
a fried ball of dough that seemed
to be in the shape of a nut.
There you have it, all of this thanks to the special tool,
the etymology dictionary, a book that
tells you the story of a word.
What other words do you think would be interesting to look up
in an etymology dictionary?
Well, if you want to look up any word,
here's an etymology dictionary online
that you can go to-- etymonline.com.
That's all for this week's question.
Thanks, Connell, for asking it.
Now for the next episode, I reached into my question jar.
And I found three questions submitted to me that I'm
thinking about answering.
When this video is done playing, you'll get to vote on one.
You can choose from, "Where does metal come from?"
or "Why isn't Pluto considered a planet anymore?"
or "How high can an airplane go?"
So submit your vote when the video's over.
I want to hear from all of you watching.
There are mysteries all around us.
Stay curious.
And see you next week.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét