Nugget

How to spell nugget

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce nugget

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nugget mean?

1. nounA small rounded lump of a solid substance, especially gold or a piece of food.
2. nounA small but genuinely valuable piece of something, such as information or advice.

Nugget in a sentence

• The prospector held up a gleaming gold nugget for the camera.

• Buried in the dull report was a real nugget of useful advice.

• The children dipped each chicken nugget in barbecue sauce.

• Every meeting with the old engineer yielded a nugget of practical wisdom.

Where does nugget come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Nugget is a homely English word whose roots reach into regional dialect rather than the classical languages. It seems to derive from an older word 'nug', recorded in south-western English dialect for a lump or a thick chunk of something, to which the small-making suffix '-et' was added, giving the sense of a little lump. The term sprang into wide use in the middle of the 1800s, when gold rushes in California and Australia made the 'gold nugget' a phrase on everyone's lips, and that association with precious metal fixed the modern meaning. From there it spread figuratively to any small but valuable thing, such as a nugget of advice, and far more recently to bite-sized pieces of food like chicken nuggets. The doubled 'g', which trips up some writers, is simply the regular English pattern of doubling a consonant after a short stressed vowel before the suffix, exactly as in 'budget' and 'fidget'.

How the word is built

• nug (dialectal English 'lump' or 'chunk')
• -et (diminutive suffix)