dough: [OE] Dough is an ancient word, with related forms scattered throughout the Indo- European languages. It goes back to an Indo- European base *dheigh-, which meant ‘mould, form, knead’, and produced Latin fingere ‘mould’ and figūra ‘figure’ (source between them of English effigy, faint, feign, fiction, figment, and figure), Sanskrit dih- ‘smear’, Gothic digan ‘mould, form’, Avestan (a dialect of Old Iranian) diz ‘mould, form’ (source of the last syllable of English paradise), and the Old English element *dig- ‘knead’, which forms the last syllable of lady.
It also produced the prehistoric Germanic *daigaz ‘something kneaded’, hence ‘dough’, whose modern Germanic descendants include German teig, Dutch deg, Swedish deg, Danish dej, and English dough. In northern areas dough used to be pronounced /duf/, which has given modern English the ‘plum duff’ [19]. => dairy, duff, effigy, faint, fiction, figure, lady, paradise
dough (n.)
Old English dag "dough," from Proto-Germanic *daigaz "something kneaded" (cognates: Old Norse deig, Swedish deg, Middle Dutch deech, Dutch deeg, Old High German teic, German Teig, Gothic daigs "dough"), from PIE *dheigh- "to build, to form, to knead" (cognates: Sanskrit dehah "body," literally "that which is formed," dih- "to besmear;" Greek teikhos "wall;" Latin fingere "to form, fashion," figura "a shape, form, figure;" Gothic deigan "to smear;" Old Irish digen "firm, solid," originally "kneaded into a compact mass"). Meaning "money" is from 1851.
