Nuggets

How to spell nuggets

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce nuggets

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nuggets mean?

1. nounSmall solid lumps of a substance, especially gold.
2. nounSmall breaded or battered pieces of food, typically chicken.
3. nounSmall, valuable pieces of information, wisdom, or insight.

Nuggets in a sentence

• The prospector pulled three gold nuggets from the riverbed.

• The children ordered chicken nuggets with a side of fries.

• Her speech contained a few real nuggets of practical advice.

• The museum displayed several ore nuggets behind reinforced glass.

• The freezer was stocked with vegetable nuggets for quick dinners.

• The report buried some useful nuggets of data in its appendix.

Where does nuggets come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Nugget appears in English only in the mid-1800s, and its origins are genuinely murky. The most widely accepted explanation traces it to a southwest English dialect word 'nug', meaning a lump or chunk, to which the diminutive ending '-et' (the same little suffix found in 'pocket' and 'cygnet') was added to mean a small lump. The word leapt into common use during the gold rushes of the 1850s, when prospectors needed a handy term for the small solid pieces of gold they prised from rock and gravel. From that very physical sense of a compact lump, English speakers soon stretched the word figuratively to mean any small, valuable piece of something, as in a nugget of advice. Because the root is dialectal and poorly recorded, the connection to 'nug' is reasonable rather than certain, which is why the double 'g' followed by the unstressed '-et' ending can trip writers up.

How the word is built

• nug (lump)
• -et (diminutive: small one)
• -s (plural)