Peanut
nounThe edible seed of a legume plant, eaten roasted or salted and used to make butter and oil.
How to spell peanut
6 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce peanut
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does peanut mean?
- nounThe edible seed of a legume plant, eaten roasted or salted and used to make butter and oil.
Peanut in a sentence
-
She spread a thick layer of peanut butter on her toast.
-
The airline no longer serves any peanut snacks because of allergy risks.
Where does peanut come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Peanut is a transparent English compound, joining 'pea' and 'nut', that arose in the early 1800s as a name for the edible seed of the Arachis hypogaea plant. The 'pea' element reflects the old idea that these small seeds resembled garden peas, while 'nut' marked them as hard, edible kernels, even though botanically the peanut is a legume rather than a true nut. The word 'pea' itself has a curious history: it was wrongly back-formed from the older 'pease', which English speakers mistook for a plural, so a single 'pease' became 'a pea'. The plant came to the wider world from South America, and earlier English names included 'groundnut' and 'goober', the latter borrowed from a Kongo word. The straightforward spelling rarely causes trouble, since both parts are common everyday words.
How the word is built
- pea (the legume)
- nut (seed/kernel)
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.