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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”).
Examples of doughty in a Sentence
Marley Marius, Vogue, 25 Feb. 2025
Such families were also the basis for some of his favorite plays—those doughty ensemble pieces, focused on a single setting over a short span of time, created by the likes of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, August Wilson, and more recently, Tracy Letts and Lydia Diamond.
—Marley Marius, Vogue, 25 Feb. 2025
The last leg of the race is a full-on fever dream of impossible race moves spliced together with flashbacks from encounters that have brought our doughty hero to this moment — of encouragement from his friends and family and cynicism from his foes.
—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
See All Example Sentences for doughty
Cite this Entry
“Doughty.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/doughty. Accessed 18 Jul. 2025.
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