conker

UK/ˈkɒŋkə/US/ˈkɒŋkə/

nounC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechneutral

Other forms: conkers

A conker is the shiny brown nut of the horse chestnut. Play conkers.

The game is played by threading one on a string and hitting somebody else's. A conker is poisonous to eat, unlike the sweet chestnut it is often confused with.

Definitions of conker

1nounconkerThe shiny brown nut of the horse chestnut.C1
“The best conker of the season won eleven games.”

conker is a nut.

Where it comes from

The nut is named after the game rather than the other way round, and the game's name is of disputed origin.

As a term for horse chestnut, derived from the name of the game conkers, which came first. Theories for the original meaning include 19th-century dialect conker (“snail-shell”) (the game of conkers was originally played using snail-shells), from conch + er, or a variant of conquer.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Trees & Flowers

Practise this word

conker in the wild

The game is played by two players, each with a conker threaded onto a piece of string: they take turns striking each other's conker until one breaks.
Conkers
The World Conker Championships (WCC) is a conkers tournament held annually on the second Sunday in October in the county of Northamptonshire, England.
World Conker Championships
Two players use conkers threaded onto a string and take turns to strike the other's nut until it shatters.
World Conker Championships
Reminiscences of his childhood and adolescence are combined with tips on how to rid your lawn of moles or produce a first-class conker.
My Year

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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