kernel
pronunciation
How to pronounce kernel in British English:
UK [ˈkɜ:nl]
How to pronounce kernel in American English:
US [ˈkɜrnl]
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- Noun:
- the inner and usually edible part of a seed or grain or nut or fruit stone
- a single whole grain of a cereal
- the choicest or most essential or most vital part of some idea or experience
Word Origin
- kernel
- kernel: [OE] Etymologically, a kernel is a ‘little seed’. Old English corn, ancestor of modern English corn, meant ‘seed, grain’, and its diminutive form cyrnel was applied to ‘pips’ (now obsolete), to ‘seeds’ (a sense which now survives only in the context of cereals), and to the ‘inner part of nuts, fruit stones, etc’.=> corn
- kernel (n.)
- Old English cyrnel "seed, kernel, pip," from Proto-Germanic *kurnilo- (cognates: Middle High German kornel, Middle Dutch cornel), from the root of corn "seed, grain" (see corn (n.1)) + -el, diminutive suffix. Figurative sense of "core or central part of anything" is from 1550s.
Example
- 1. That is the kernel of truth in mr einhorn 's argument .
- 2. British imports of sustainable palm kernel meal are precisely zero .
- 3. Cornstarch is made from the endosperm of the corn kernel .
- 4. In those early times ( around 1991 ) it wasn 't unknown for him to release a new kernel more than once aday !
- 5. The kernel marks these memory regions as uncacheable in the page tables .