hazel
noun · adjective
Simple meaning
A greenish-brown colour, the colour of a ripe hazelnut.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
hayzuhlSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
ˈheɪzəl
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
countable and uncountable
A greenish-brown colour, the colour of a ripe hazelnut.
countable
The nut of the hazel tree.
Australian tree grown especially for ornament and its fine-grained wood and bearing edible nuts
A minor city in Calloway County, Kentucky.
A place in the United States
adjective
Of a greenish-brown colour. (often used to refer to eye colour)
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B2 · Upper Intermediate (estimated)
- Frequency
- Moderately Common
- Typical Use
- Neutral / general English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: (countable and uncountable) A greenish-brown colour, the colour of a ripe hazelnut.
Used this way, hazel is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
Australian tree grown especially for ornament and its fine-grained wood and bearing edible nuts.
Common shrub of the eastern United States with smooth bark.
A variety of dormouse.
Any of several Asiatic deciduous shrubs cultivated for their nodding racemes of yellow flowers that appear before the leaves.
Fragrant shrub of lower Mississippi valley having very small flowers from midwinter to spring.
Common shrub of eastern North America having small yellow flowers after the leaves have fallen.
Related words
Connected by subject or meaning, not by word formation.
Hazel of western United States with conspicuous beaklike involucres on the nuts.
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
Synonyms
Sense: of a greenish-brown colour. (often used to refer to eye colour)
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.