kernel

UK/ˈkɜː.nəl/US/ˈkɝ.nəl/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,606 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: kernels

A kernel is the soft part inside a nut, or the core of a matter. A kernel of corn, the kernel of truth, crack the shell for the kernel.

A kernel of truth is the standard phrase for the real thing inside an exaggerated story. In computing, the kernel is the core of an operating system, the part that talks to the hardware. The word is a diminutive of corn, meaning a seed.

Definitions of kernel

1nounkernelThe soft part inside a nut, or the core of a matter.B2+
“She cracked the walnut and picked out the kernel with her fingers.”

kernel is a core.

Where it comes from

Old English cyrnel is a diminutive of corn, a seed or grain.

Middle English
kirnel
English, today
kernel

From Middle English kirnel. From Middle English kernel, kirnel, kurnel, from Old English cyrnel, from Proto-West Germanic kurnil, diminutive of Proto-Germanic kurną (“seed, grain, corn”), equivalent to corn + -le. Cognate with Yiddish קערנדל, Middle Dutch kernel, cornel, Middle High German kornel. Related also to Old Norse kjarni (“kernel”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

kernel in the wild

Device drivers can be added to the kernel as loadable kernel modules.
Monolithic kernel
A modern computer operating system usually uses virtual memory to provide separate address spaces or regions of a single address space, called user space and kernel space.
User space and kernel space
Kernel space is strictly reserved for running a privileged operating system kernel, kernel extensions, and most device drivers.
User space and kernel space
Kernel panics can also be caused by errors originating outside kernel space.
Kernel panic
In machine learning, kernel machines are a class of algorithms for pattern analysis, whose best known member is the support-vector machine (SVM).
Kernel method

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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.

Related words

corn

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