Nutty means tasting of nuts. The almond note in marzipan, the hazelnut edge of a good brown loaf.
It is a tasting word above all, and food writing leans on it hard: a nutty cheese, a nutty olive oil, wholemeal flour with a nutty flavour. It describes texture in wine and coffee too. The second sense is entirely different and informal, since a nutty person is mildly mad, as in a nutty idea or the phrase nutty as a fruitcake. Both go back to nut, which has meant a head, and then a madman, for well over a century.
1adjectivenuttyTasting of nuts.
“The bread has a warm, nutty flavour.”
Patterna nutty flavour / taste / aroma · rich and nutty · nuts
2adjectiveslightlySlightly mad or eccentric.
“It was a nutty idea, but it worked.”
NUTty → it tastes of NUTS
It is nut + y: it tastes of nuts, like brown bread full of seeds.
hooks ontonut
Middle English
note
English
nut
English, today
nutty
From nut + -y. nut comes from Middle English note. From Middle English note, nute, from Old English hnutu, from Proto-West Germanic hnut, from Proto-Germanic hnuts (“nut”), from a root knu- possibly shared with Proto-Celtic knūs and Latin nux (“nut”). Based on the form of the nouns and the restriction of the root to Germanic, Celtic and Italic, it has been argued to be of non-Indo-European (qfa-sub -) origin. See also West Frisian nút, Dutch noot, German Nuss, Danish nød, Swedish nöt, Norwegian nøtt*.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA