doughty

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for November 11, 2025 is: doughty • DOW-tee  • adjective Doughty is a word with an old-fashioned flair used to describe someone who is brave, strong, and determined. // The monument celebrates the doughty townspeople who fended off invaders centuries ago. See the entry > Examples: “The film chooses to render our doughty heroes’ super-costumes as cerulean-blue rollneck sweaters, which is a puzzling choice both aesthetically and practically: knitwear seems literally ill-fitted to derring-do.” — Glen Weldon, NPR, 25 July 2025 Did you know? 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”).