Hazel

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈheɪzəl/

Definitions

1. A light brown or greenish-brown color, often used to describe eyes or the wood of a small tree
2. A shade of brown with hints of green that commonly describes both eye color and the wood derived from a specific type of tree
3. This name refers to a color that combines light brown and green, frequently associated with eye coloration and a particular tree's timber

Etymology: The tree came first and the colour came later. Old English "hæsl" named the hazel shrub, a plant that has been part of European woodland for thousands of years, and the word stretches back through Proto-Germanic "haslaz" to a Proto-Indo-European root "kóslos" meaning the same thing. The fact that matters most is that the word's relatives are spread across the whole Indo-European family, from German "Hasel" and Dutch "hazel" to Latin "corylus" and Welsh "cyll," which points to a very old and widely shared name for the plant. The eye colour is a later extension of the tree's name. Hazel nuts and the brown-green wood of the shrub gave English speakers a comparison for a particular shade, and from there the word came to describe eyes that are neither plainly brown nor plainly green but a mixture of both.

Synonyms: hazelnut, nut