Of doughnuts and crullers

Working as a business proofreader and translator I’m often called on to localize documents from US to UK English and generally think I have a pretty good grasp of my bonnets and my hoods, my shalls and my shoulds, my gots and my gottens. But when a character in the US novel I was reading ate a cruller for breakfast, I suddenly realised I had no idea what was going on.

US-English etimology can be fascinating, especially for words that seem to have jumped from mainland Europe across the Pond to North America with almost no influence on British English. Websters tells me that cruller comes from the Dutch krulle meaning a twisted cake. OED adds that it seems to be from the Dutch crullen to curl (which also gives us crewel, for a kind of twisted yarn).

“a small sweet cake in the form of a twisted strip fried in deep fat”

In Merriam-Webster.com