What's In A Name?

From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary Word of the Day for January 8th:

doughty • \DOW-tee "OW" as in "cow"\ • adjective
: marked by fearless resolution : valiant

Example sentence:

"Guy . . . is a doughty Swiss immigrant who insists the only cure for illness is fifteen minutes of violent gymnastics followed by a freezing shower." (Tad Friend, Vogue, January 1991)

Did you know?

"Doughty" is a persevering Old English word. Its earliest form was "dyhtig," but early on, the vowel changed, and the word became "dohtig." That was probably due to influence from a related Old English word, "dohte," that meant "had worth." By the 13th century, the spelling "doughty" had begun to appear. The expected pronunciation would be \DAW-tee\, paralleling other similarly spelled old words like "bought" and "sought." But over the centuries, the spelling was sometimes confused with that of the now obsolete word "doubty" full of doubt, and thus, so it is conjectured, we have the pronunciation we use today.