Hazel is a shrub bearing edible nuts, or a light brown colour. A hazel wood, hazel eyes, cut hazel rods.
Coppicing it — cutting to the base and letting it regrow — was the basis of a whole rural economy, since the poles made hurdles, thatching spars and charcoal. The eye colour named after it shifts between brown and green depending on the light.
1nounhazelA shrub bearing edible nuts.
“Squirrels had stripped the hazel bushes of their nuts by early autumn.”
2adjectivelightA light brown eye colour.
“She had long dark hair and warm hazel eyes.”
hazel is a shrub, or a colour.
Old English haesl names the shrub, from a Germanic root. Latin corylus is a distant relative.
Proto-Indo-European
*kóslos — hazel
Proto-Germanic
*haslaz — hazel
Proto-West Germanic
*hasl
Old English
hæsl — hazel, shrub
Middle English
hasel
English, today
hazel
From Middle English hasel, from Old English hæsl (“hazel, shrub”), from Proto-West Germanic hasl, from Proto-Germanic haslaz (“hazel”), from Proto-Indo-European kóslos (“hazel”). 2 Cognate with yol hawlse (“hazel”), Dutch hazel, hazelaar (“hazel”), German Hasel (“hazel”), wym hozuł (“hazel”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål and Swedish hassel (“hazel”), Icelandic hesli (“hazel”), Norwegian Nynorsk hasl, hassel (“hazel”); also Latin corulus, corylus (“hazel”), Irish call, coll (“hazel”), gv coull (“hazel”), Scottish Gaelic coll (“hazel”), Welsh cyll (“hazel trees”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA