Nut

How to spell nut

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce nut

What does nut mean?

1. nounA hard-shelled dry fruit or seed of certain plants, with an edible kernel inside.
2. nounA small metal block with a threaded hole, screwed onto a bolt to hold parts together.
3. nounAn informal term for a devoted enthusiast or fan of something.

Nut in a sentence

• She cracked the nut open to get at the kernel inside.

• He tightened the nut on the bolt with a spanner.

• As a fitness nut he runs ten miles every morning.

• The recipe calls for one chopped nut scattered over the cake.

• One nut had worked loose from the bracket.

• Her brother is a real history nut who reads about little else.

Where does nut come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Nut comes straight from the Old English word hnutu, which named the hard-shelled seed of trees such as the hazel and the walnut. It belongs to a wide family of Germanic relatives, including the Dutch noot and the German Nuss, and linguists trace them all back to a shared ancient root meaning the hard fruit of a tree. The early spelling carried a silent h before the n, a feature that English quietly dropped over the centuries, leaving the tidy three-letter form we use today. From the literal seed the word stretched outward by resemblance: a small metal block with a threaded hole became a nut because it caps and grips the end of a bolt much as a shell caps a kernel. Later still it picked up affectionate slang senses for an eccentric person or a devoted enthusiast, both rooted in the playful image of someone's head being like a hard little kernel.

How the word is built

• nut (single root, from Old English hnutu)