Peanuts

How to spell peanuts

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce peanuts

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does peanuts mean?

1. nounEdible seeds of a legume plant, often roasted and eaten as a snack.
2. nounAn informal term for a very small or insignificant amount of money.

Peanuts in a sentence

• The bar set out small bowls of salted peanuts for the customers.

• The new job pays peanuts compared with her previous salary.

• She is allergic to peanuts, so she checks every label carefully.

• After taxes and fees, the dividend amounted to peanuts.

Where does peanuts come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound formed from 'pea' and 'nut', recorded from the early 1800s in American usage. The first element, 'pea', descends from the Old English 'pise' or 'piose', itself borrowed from the Latin 'pisum', the name for the legume. The botanical joke buried in the word is that the peanut is not a true nut at all but a legume, closer kin to peas and beans than to walnuts, and the name captures exactly that: a pea-like seed that resembles a nut. The 'nut' element is native Old English 'hnutu', a word shared widely across the Germanic languages. By the late nineteenth century the plural had also picked up the slang sense of 'a trifling amount of money', from the idea of paying someone only enough to buy a small bag of peanuts.

How the word is built

• pea (the legume seed)
• nut (edible kernel)
• -s (plural)