Acorn

How to spell acorn

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce acorn

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does acorn mean?

1. nounThe nut of an oak tree, a smooth oval seed sitting in a rough woody cup.

Acorn in a sentence

• The squirrel buried an acorn beneath the garden hedge.

• Every autumn a fallen acorn crunches underfoot on the park path.

Where does acorn come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from the Old English aecern, which meant the nut or fruit of a forest tree, especially the oak. It is a native Germanic word with relatives across the old northern languages, including the Gothic akran meaning 'fruit' and the Old Norse akarn. Scholars believe it was originally connected to the root that also gives us 'acre', describing the open, uncultivated land or wild forest where such fruits grew, so an aecern was literally the 'produce of the wild'. Over the centuries English speakers, no longer recognising the old root, reshaped the spelling by folk etymology, wrongly imagining it as a blend of 'oak' and 'corn' because acorns are the seed of the oak. That mistaken association is exactly why the modern spelling settled with the 'a' and the 'corn' ending, even though neither part is genuinely present in the word's origin.

How the word is built

• acorn (a single, unanalysable native root; not 'a'
• 'corn' despite the look)