Bagel
noun, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A toroidal bread roll that is boiled before it is baked.
- 2 Alternative form of bagle. alt-of, alternative
"“He’s so adorable, Aaron. Part beagle, part basset hound.” “A bagel. Very appropriate.”"
- 3 (Yiddish) glazed yeast-raised doughnut-shaped roll with hard crust wordnet
- 4 A score of 6-0 in a set (after the shape of a bagel, which looks like a zero). slang
"The Scot, who had been close to a two-set deficit in his semi-final against David Ferrer, avoided the dreaded bagel by seeing off a set point at 5-0 down before finally breaking the Djokovic serve to love as he began to go for his shots with the set seemingly gone."
- 5 An overly materialistic and selfish young Jewish man. South-Africa, ethnic, slang, slur
- 1 To achieve a score of 6–0 (as the winner) in a tennis set.
- 2 To hold an opponent to a score of zero.
Example
More examples"Eh, it's an onion-flavoured bagel!"
Etymology
Borrowed from Yiddish בייגל (beygl), ultimately from a diminutive of Middle High German bouc, boug- (“ring, bracelet”), from Old High German boug (“ring”), from Proto-West Germanic *baug, from Proto-Germanic *baugaz (“ring”). Compare obsolete English bee, Old English bēag, Old Frisian bāg, Old Saxon bōg, Middle Low German bōg, Old Norse baugr. Also compare dialectal Austrian German Beugel, Beigel. See also beag.
Related phrases
More for "bagel"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.