Word.ws English Dictionary

Donutgate

Donutgate proper noun: a 2015 controversy in which American singer, songwriter, and actress Ariana Grande was seen on surveillance video in a shop licking donuts that were on display and saying “I hate Americans. I hate America. This is disgusting.”.

Proper noun

Donutgate

  1. (slang) A 2015 controversy in which American singer, songwriter, and actress Ariana Grande was seen on surveillance video in a shop licking donuts that were on display and saying “I hate Americans. I hate America. This is disgusting.”
    • A family friend says “Donutgate” won’t stop Grande’s rise to the pinnacle of music stardom.2015 July 16, Leslie Gray Streeter, “For Ariana Grande, it began in Boca”, in The Palm Beach Post, West Palm Beach, Fla., page D1
    • The Focus singer and [Ricky] Alvarez started dating last year after they were spotted kissing in a surveillance footage for the now-infamous “Donutgate” where the two were seen licking donuts sold in a store.2016 July 28, “Grande splits from dancer-boyfriend”, in SunStar Cebu, page B5

Examples of Donutgate in a sentence

  • The 2016 DNC email hack revealed that “donutgate” cost her a gig at the [Barack] Obama White House.2018 December 27, Elle Hunt, “Ariana Grande: a beacon of resilience in her worst and biggest year”, in The Guardian, page 18:
  • #Donutgate was so perfectly random as to seem almost engineered, and we — pun intended — ate it up.2019 December 23, Sean Santiago, “Remember When Ariana Grande Got Caught Licking Doughnuts and Yelling "I Hate America"?”, in InStyle...
  • Ariana delves into another slinky verse, seducing us with relatable quips about making “too many mistakes” and how she “better get this right” (is she alluding to her #DonutGate here?2020, Stephen Jinku Hughes, “Ariana Grande—"Into You": A Song That Deserved Better”, in Salient, page 35, column 1:
  • In 2015, in an incident forever known as DONUTGATE, Ariana Grande was caught on camera licking some donuts in a California bakery and then putting them back on the shelf.2023, Dylan Hart, 1000 Weird Facts About Hollywood, →ISBN:

Forms of Donutgate

alternative formDoughnutgate

Origin of Donutgate

From donut + -gate.

Questions about Donutgate

What does Donutgate mean?
Donutgate means a 2015 controversy in which American singer, songwriter, and actress Ariana Grande was seen on surveillance video in a shop licking donuts that were on display and saying “I hate Americans. I hate America. This is disgusting.”.
How do you use Donutgate in a sentence?
The 2016 DNC email hack revealed that “donutgate” cost her a gig at the [Barack] Obama White House.
What part of speech is Donutgate?
Donutgate is a proper noun.

Words near Donutgate in the dictionary

  1. donut steel
  2. donuteria
  3. donuterias
  4. donuteries
  5. donutery
  6. Donutgate
  7. donutless
  8. donutlike
  9. donuts
  10. donutteries
  11. donuttery

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Donutgate (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Donutgate.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/donutgate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.