Word.ws English Dictionary

doughboy

doughboy noun: an American infantryman, especially one from World War I.

Noun

doughboy (plural doughboys)

  1. (US) An American infantryman, especially one from World War I.
    • The "dough boys" were loaded into army wagons drawn by mules, and with the cavalry at the flanks the relief column started.1901 July 19, “Horses in time of War”, in The Agricultural Journal and Mining Record, volume 4, number 10, page 296
    • The miser, a-seeking lost gelt, / The doughboy, awaiting the battle, / May possibly know how I felt / While the long years dragged by as the dealer / As slow as the slowest of dubs, / Stuck out the last helping of tickets / 'Till I lifted—the Bullet of Clubs!1969, Robert L. Vann, The Competitor, volumes 2-3, page 135
  2. A kind of flour dumpling.
  3. Frybread.

Forms of doughboy

pluraldoughboys

Origin of doughboy

From dough + boy; its use to refer to an infantryman is unknown, but dates from 1847, during the Mexican–American War.

Questions about doughboy

What does doughboy mean?
Doughboy means an American infantryman, especially one from World War I.
What part of speech is doughboy?
Doughboy is a noun.
What is the plural of doughboy?
The plural of doughboy is doughboys.

Words near doughboy in the dictionary

  1. doughball
  2. doughballs
  3. doughbelly
  4. doughbird
  5. doughbirds
  6. doughboy
  7. doughboys
  8. doughed
  9. dougher
  10. doughers
  11. Dougherty

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: doughboy (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-doughboy.wav.

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