acorn

[ ey-kawrn, ey-kern ]

noun

1. the typically ovoid fruit or nut of an oak, enclosed at the base by a cupule.
2. a finial or knop, as on a piece of furniture, in the form of an acorn.

acorn

/ ˈeɪkɔːn /

noun

1. the fruit of an oak tree, consisting of a smooth thick-walled nut in a woody scaly cuplike base

Other Words From

• acorned adjective

Word History and Origins

Origin of acorn¹

before 1000; Middle English acorne (influenced by corn ¹ ), replacing akern, Old English æcern, æcren mast, oak-mast; cognate with Old Norse akarn fruit of wild trees, Middle High German ackeran acorn, Gothic akran fruit, yield < Germanic *akrana-; alleged derivation from base of acre is dubious if original reference was to wild trees

Word History and Origins

Origin of acorn¹

C16: a variant (through influence of corn ) of Old English æcern the fruit of a tree, acorn; related to Gothic akran fruit, yield

Example Sentences

The caches must be maintained over time to keep dried-out acorns screwed firmly in their holes and rivals like squirrels away.

From Popular-Science

Almost all of us hide some food, like squirrels that bury acorns in fall to have food in winter.

From Washington Blade

What Spanish farmers need from their oak-dotted fields where pigs get fat on acorns will be different from what farmers in Ecuador want from their coffee plants growing under the cool shade of tropical inga trees.

From Science News

Bears also cut their sleeping time when more natural food, was available in late fall, such as acorns or berries.

From Science News For Students

Whitetails are browsers and will feed on herbaceous plants, acorns, berries, and other shrubs.

From Popular-Science

Perhaps nowhere has an ACORN spin-off been as successful as one has in New York City.

From The Daily Beast

Action Now recently helped elect Toni Foulkes, a former Chicago ACORN leader, to the Chicago City Council.

From The Daily Beast

ACORN was able to do a lot of things for low-income people, but they were stopped.

From The Daily Beast

But my favorite story linked—inevitably—the navigator program to ACORN.

From The Daily Beast

These were the adopted symbols of the Vanderbilts, as “from an acorn a mighty oak shall grow.”

From The Daily Beast

Every few days after that the boy took Squinty out of his pen, and let him do the rope-jumping and the acorn-hunting tricks.

From Project Gutenberg

The two animal friends soon came to where some of the acorn nuts had fallen off a tree, and they ate as many as they wanted.

From Project Gutenberg

It was then more than this only in the same sense as the egg, new-laid, is the full-grown fowl, or the acorn the oak.

From Project Gutenberg

When I went into this kitchen, there was a cake baking, with an ornament on the top that looked quite like an acorn.

From Project Gutenberg

All powers lie hidden within us as the oak tree lies hidden in the acorn.

From Project Gutenberg