nut
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
3 characters
Language
English
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "nut", 3-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "nut" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "nut" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
nut is aEnglishnoun. It means: Any of various hard-shelled seeds or hard, dry fruits from various families of plants. Pronounced /nʌt/. It ranks #6,715 in English word frequency. Often confused with NZ and NYC.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | nut |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /nʌt/ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #6,715 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for nut is 3 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /nʌt/. Corpus data places it at rank #6,715 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 21 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for nut in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "NZ", "NYC", "nye", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: 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 o… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is nut, spelled N-U-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1Any of various hard-shelled seeds or hard, dry fruits from various families of plants.
- 2Any of various hard-shelled seeds or hard, dry fruits from various families of plants.
- 3A piece of hardware, typically metal and typically hexagonal or square in shape, with a hole through it having internal screw threads, intended to be screwed onto a threaded bolt or other threaded shaft.
- 4The head.
- 5A crazy person.
- 6An extreme enthusiast.
- 7An extravagantly fashionable young man.
- 8Senses related to male genitalia.
- 9Senses related to male genitalia.
- 10Senses related to male genitalia.
- 11Senses related to male genitalia.
- 12Monthly expense to keep a venture running.
- 13The amount of money necessary to set up some venture; set-up costs.
- 14A stash of money owned by an extremely rich investor, sufficient to sustain a high level of consumption if all other money is lost.
- 15On stringed instruments such as guitars and violins, the small piece at the peghead end of the fingerboard that holds the strings at the proper spacing and, in most cases, the proper height.
- 16En, a unit of measurement equal to half of the height of the type in use.
- 17A shaped piece of metal, threaded by a wire loop, which is jammed in a crack in the rockface and used to protect a climb. (Originally, machine nuts [sense #2] were used for this purpose.)
- 18The best possible hand of a certain type. Compare nuts (“the best possible hand available”).
- 19The tumbler of a gunlock.
- 20A projection on each side of the shank of an anchor, to secure the stock in place.
- 21A small rounded cake or cookie.
Etymology
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 (substrate) origin. See also West Frisian nút, Dutch noot, German Nuss, Danish nød, Swedish nöt, Norwegian nøtt.
Synonyms
This word in other languages
Frequency rank: #6,715 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter N in our English index: