donut

The donut is best known as a sweet fried pastry, usually shaped like a ring or made as a small round piece with a filling inside. It is a very common food word in English and often brings to mind glazed, sugared, frosted, or cream-filled treats sold in bakeries and coffee shops. In American English, the spelling "donut" is very common, while "doughnut" is the older and more formal spelling.

The word is also used beyond food. If something has a hole in the middle and a ring around it, people may call it "donut-shaped." You might hear this for buildings, cushions, floats, or charts. In driving slang, "doing donuts" means spinning a car in tight circles, often on purpose and often leaving circular marks on the ground.

Because of these uses, the word can point either to the pastry itself, to a ring-like shape, or to the driving move. The food meaning is by far the most common, and that is the sense most learners will meet first. The word sometimes appears in a playful way in pop culture or casual speech, but its main job in English is still simple: it names a familiar sweet snack and, by extension, things that share its round shape.