deig.

Inherited from Danish deig, older spelling of dej, from Old Norse deig, from Proto-Germanic *daigaz, from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeyǵʰ- (“to knead, form”). Compare Icelandic deig, Faroese deiggj, Swedish deg, English dough, Dutch deeg, German Teig. Further notes Mid-19th-century Danish retained an otherwise archaic spelling with ⟨ig⟩ or ⟨ug⟩ in a small number of words, namely boug, deig, feig, laug, ploug, saug, seig, toug. All of these have since been regularized to bov, dej, fej, lav, plov, sav, sej, tov. In Norway, however, the older spellings were retained as they fit in with native dialects and to some extent also with the local standard pronunciation. (In some cases, the forms were later made even more phonetic: baug, plog, sag, tau.) The above-mentioned group of spellings inherited with ⟨g⟩ from Danish must be distinguished from forms such as skog, mage, veg (versus Danish skov, mave, vej). These latter are specifically Norwegian and more numerous. They were introduced chiefly in the 20th century and received varying degrees of acceptance.