Washington Irving's 1809 book A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty: The name oly koeks was almost certainly related to the oliekoek: a Dutch delicacy of "sweetened cake fried in fat." Etymology "Dough nut" One of the earliest known literary usages of the term dates to an 1808 short story describing a spread of "fire-cakes and dough-nuts". Washington Irving described "dough-nuts", in his 1809 History of New York, as "balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog's fat, and called dough-nuts, or olykoeks." These "nuts" of fried dough might now be called doughnut holes (see holes section). The word nut is here used in the earlier sense of "small rounded cake or cookie", also seen in ginger nut. Doughnut is the traditional spelling and still dominates even in the United States though donut is often used. At present, doughnut and the shortened form donut are both pervasive in American English. "Donut" The first known printed use of donut was in Peck's Bad Boy and his Pa by George W. Peck, published in 1900, in which a character is quoted as saying, "Pa said he guessed he hadn't got much appetite, and he would just drink a cup of coffee and eat a donut." According to author John T. Edge the alternative spelling "donut" was invented in the 1920s when the New York–based Display Doughnut Machine Corporation abbreviated the word to make it more pronounceable by the foreigners they hoped would buy their automated doughnut making equipment. The donut spelling also showed up in a Los Angeles Times article dated August 10, 1929 in which Bailey Millard jokingly complains about the decline of spelling, and that he "can't swallow the 'wel-dun donut' nor the ever so 'gud bred'." The interchangeability of the two spellings can be found in a series of "National Donut Week" articles in The New York Times that covered the 1939 World's Fair. In four articles beginning October 9, two mention the donut spelling. Dunkin' Donuts, which was so-named in 1950, following its 1948 founding under the name Open Kettle (Quincy, Massachusetts), is the oldest surviving company to use the donut variation; other chains, such as the defunct Mayflower Doughnut Corporation (1931), did not use that spelling. According to the Oxford Dictionaries while "doughnut" is used internationally, the spelling "donut" is American. The spelling "donut" remained rare until