Nutty

How to spell nutty

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce nutty

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nutty mean?

1. adjectiveTasting or smelling of nuts.
2. adjectiveFoolish, eccentric, or slightly mad (informal).

Nutty in a sentence

• The wholemeal loaf had a pleasant nutty flavour.

• His nutty scheme to retire by forty actually worked.

• A good aged cheese can be rich and slightly nutty.

• The neighbours have a nutty idea about painting the fence purple.

Where does nutty come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built on the everyday noun 'nut', which comes from the Old English hnutu, the name for a hard-shelled fruit or kernel. That Old English form goes back to a common Germanic root shared with the Dutch noot and the German Nuss, all meaning the same kind of edible seed inside a tough shell. The adjective 'nutty' was formed in the usual English way by adding the suffix -y, which turns a noun into an adjective meaning 'full of' or 'resembling', and the final t was doubled to keep the short vowel sound. Its first recorded sense, from around the early 1600s, was the literal one of 'abounding in nuts' or 'tasting of nuts'. The playful figurative sense of 'crazy' or 'eccentric' arrived much later, in the nineteenth century, drawing on slang in which 'nut' meant the head, so a person who was 'nutty' was thought to be soft or unsound in the head. The doubled t is the only real spelling point to watch, since it follows the same pattern as 'sunny' or 'funny'.

How the word is built

• nut (Old English hnutu: hard-shelled fruit)
• -y (adjective suffix), with the final t doubled before the suffix