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doughboy

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Dough Boy
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dough⋅boy

  [doh-boi]
Use doughboy in a Sentence
–noun
1. Informal. an American infantryman, esp. in World War I.
2. a rounded mass of dough, boiled or steamed as a dumpling or deep-fried and served as a hot bread.
Origin:
1675–85; dough + boy; sense “infantryman,” from mid-1860s, is obscurely derived; two plausible, but unsubstantiated claims: doughboy orig. referred to the globular brass buttons on infantry uniforms, likened to the pastry; dough referred to a clay used to clean the white uniform belts
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Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
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Dough Boy
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dough·boy   (dō'boi')   
n.  

  1. A piece of bread dough that is rolled thin and fried in deep fat.

  2. An American infantryman in World War I.


[Sense 2, perhaps from the large buttons on American uniforms of the 1860s, said to resemble doughboys (sense 1).]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Main Entry:  doughboy
Part of Speech:  n
Definition:  See fried dough
Dictionary.com's 21st Century Lexicon
Copyright © 2003-2009 Dictionary.com, LLC
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Word Origin & History

doughboy 
"U.S. soldier," 1865, said to have been in oral use from 1854, or from the Mexican-American War (1847), it is perhaps from resemblance of big buttons on old uniforms to biscuits of that name, but there are various other conjectures.
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper
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