Chestnut

How to spell chestnut

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce chestnut

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chestnut mean?

1. nounThe smooth, glossy edible nut of the chestnut tree, or the tree itself.
2. adjectiveOf a deep reddish-brown colour, especially of hair or a horse's coat.
3. nounA joke, story, or remark that has been repeated so often it has grown stale.

Chestnut in a sentence

• noun

  She roasted one chestnut at a time over the open fire at Christmas.

• adjective

  Her chestnut hair caught the autumn light.

• noun

  His speech trotted out the same old chestnut about airline food.

• noun

  A tall chestnut shaded the whole corner of the garden.

• adjective

  The rider entered the ring on a glossy chestnut mare.

• noun

  That anecdote is a well-worn chestnut everyone at the office has heard.

Where does chestnut come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The first half of this word goes back to the Latin castanea, the name for the chestnut tree, which the Romans in turn borrowed from the Greek kastaneia, possibly named after a town in Asia Minor or in Greece where the trees grew thickly. In Old English the tree was called a 'chesten' or 'chesten-tree', a form filtered through Old French chastaigne, and over time English speakers added the plain word 'nut' to make the meaning unmistakable, giving us 'chesten-nut' and then 'chestnut'. The silent middle is the trap: people hear 'chesnut' and drop the 't', but it survives because of that buried Latin 'st'. The same Latin root produced 'castanets', the wooden clappers, which were originally shaped like two little chestnuts. By the 1800s 'chestnut' had also gathered a figurative life, coming to mean a tired, often-repeated joke or story, reportedly from a stage play in which a stale tale about a chestnut tree was endlessly retold.

How the word is built

• chest- (from Old French chastaigne, from Latin castanea: chestnut)
• nut (the edible kernel)