Bagel came into English in 1912 from Yiddish beygl, and behind the Yiddish is Middle High German boug-, "ring, bracelet," from Old High German boug, "a ring." So the word means simply "little ring," named for its shape rather than its ingredients.
The pleasure of this one is the family it turns out to belong to. That Germanic root for a ring is the same one behind Old English beag, also "ring" — a word that mattered enormously in Anglo-Saxon poetry, where a generous lord was a beaggifa, a "ring-giver," because rings were how a lord paid his warriors. Underneath both is an ancient root meaning "to bend," which throws off words for curved things across the whole family. A bagel and a ring-giving Anglo-Saxon king are holding on to opposite ends of the same word.
bagel (n.) "ring-shaped hard bread roll," 1912 ( beigel ), from Yiddish beygl , from Middle High German boug- "ring, bracelet," from Old High German boug "a ring," related to Old English beag "ring" (in poetry, an Anglo-Saxon lord was beaggifa "ring-giver"), from Proto-Germanic *baugaz , from PIE root *bheug- "to bend," with derivatives referring to curved objects. also from 1912
bagel came in through Later and wider borrowings, and its spelling follows that family's conventions.
What gives it away on the page
| schl-, schm-, chutz- | Yiddish and Hebrew, where ch is a throat sound.schlep, schmaltz, chutzpah, kosher, bagel |
Later and wider borrowings in the spelling guide · guess another word's family