Other forms: walnuts
A walnut is the wrinkled brown nut that looks like a tiny brain inside its hard, round shell. You crack it at Christmas, pick the halves out with the point of a knife, and find the bitter papery skin between them.
The tree is a walnut too, a big spreading thing that drops its nuts in green cases in autumn. So is the timber: walnut is a dark, richly grained wood used for furniture, gunstocks and the dashboards of old cars, so a walnut table is about the wood and not the fruit. Walnut names a colour as well, that deep warm brown. And walnut oil, pressed from the nuts, turns up in salad dressings and in artists' paint.
1nounwalnutA wrinkled brown nut in a hard round shell.~40%
“He cracked a walnut and handed her half.”
2nountallThe tall tree that these nuts grow on.~50%
“An old walnut shaded the whole end of the garden.”
3nounwoodThe dark, finely grained wood of that tree.~10%
“The desk was walnut, with a worn leather top.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
The Old English name was wealhhnutu, literally foreign nut. The wealh part is the same element that sits inside the word Welsh, where it once meant not one of ours, and the Proto-Germanic form means foreigner-nut. English named it the outsiders' nut, the one that came from elsewhere. The same trick shows up in Welsh onion, another import.
Proto-Germanic
*walhahnuts
Old English
wealhhnutu — walnut
Middle English
walnote
English, today
walnut
From Middle English walnote, walnutte, walnotte, from Old English wealhhnutu (“walnut”) literally “foreign nut”, from Proto-Germanic walhahnuts literally “foreigner-nut”. Cognate with Dutch walnoot, German Walnuss, Swedish valnöt, Icelandic valhneta. Compare more recent term Welsh onion, which also uses Welsh to mean “foreign”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA