Policing the Doughnuts and the Donuts

Recently, a student in the copyediting class I teach contested a question she got wrong on a proofreading quiz. She had changed “doughnut to “donut,” and I subtracted a point.

“Isn’t ‘donut’ also a correct spelling?” she asked.

Sure it is, I replied, just not in this class.

The course teaches book editing based on the Chicago Manual of Style. The Chicago manual’s “designated” dictionary -- the one to which it refers on all matters not contained in the manual itself -- is Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. That’s different from the Associated Press Stylebook’s designated dictionary, Webster’s New World College Dictionary.

Whenever words can have more than one spelling, dictionaries usually note them all. But they also tell which one they prefer. Sometimes they do this by labeling one spelling as a “variant” of the other.  Other times the dictionaries are a little more subtle, inserting “sometimes” or “also” in front of the alternate word spelling, like in “doughnut, also donut.” The dictionaries can also let you know that one spelling is an “informal” alternative, clearly implying that they consider the other to be proper.

Merriam-Webster’s has entries for both “doughnut” and “donut,” but in its entry for "donut" it says only that this is “an informal spelling of doughnut.” If you want the definition, you have to look it up under the preferred spelling.

Webster’s New World also prefers "doughnut."

Why does their preference matter so much? Well, to most people it doesn’t. You can choose either “donut” or “doughnut” as you prefer. (Personally, I feel it’s time to retire "doughnut." The way I see it, nothing is lost because "dough" was misleading anyway. They aren't made from dough. They're made from batter.) But copy editors don’t get to choose. To ensure consistency, we go with our designated dictionary’s preferred spelling.

And that’s why I ruled against the student: her logic had a hole in it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 6th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.