How did the doughnut(donut) receive its name and how did "nut" become part of dough?

http://www.wentz.net/donut/history_of_the_donut.htm

Apparently, according to this website, the cake didn’t cook all the way through and the woman put nuts in the center. So dough nuts.

Which nut ate the holes is what i’d like to know.

I just thought it was because they’re shaped like nuts (the sort of nut that screws onto a bolt, not the sort of nut that grows on a tree).

The wiki says:

The earliest known recorded usage of the term dates an 1808 short story[5] describing a spread of “fire-cakes and dough-nuts.” Washington Irving’s reference to “doughnuts” in 1809 in his History of New York is more commonly cited as the first written recording of the term. Irving described “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called doughnuts, or olykoeks.”[6] These “nuts” of fried dough might now be called doughnut holes.

@john65pennington You didn’t have your first doughnut until you were 45 years old?! (Real answer….I’m betting it’s because when you punch out the center you have a little “nut” you can cook….)

1809, Amer.Eng., from dough + nut. First recorded by Washington Irving, who described them as “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called doughnuts, or olykoeks.”

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=doughnut&searchmode=term

But before they had holes, they were strips of dough that were rolled or twisted up and dropped into fat. They would turn themselves over as they cooked so both sides were evenly done. It wasn’t until much later that the shape changed, but they were called doughnuts before the hole was added.

Naught is the old word for zero. It’s dough in the shape of a naught… get it?

you don’t wanna know