[f. BUTTER sb.1 + NUT.]
1. A large oily nut, the fruit of the Juglans cinerea or White Walnut-tree of N. America.
1753. Chambers, Cycl. Supp., s.v., Butter-nut, a fruit in New England, whose kernel yields a great quantity of sweet oil.
1882. Garden, 11 Nov., 433/3. The Butter Nut … strongly resembles the Walnut both in shape and flavour.
1883. Ayer, in Harper’s Mag., Feb., 365/1. That is where the children used to crack the hickory and butter nuts.
b. The tree itself. (More fully butternut-tree.)
1783. Dr. Rush, Lett., in Mem. J. C. Lettsom, III. 188. The Butter-nut pill … is made by boiling the inner bark of a species of the Walnut in water.
1856. Bryant, Fountain, vii. The dark fruit That falls from the gray butternut’s long boughs.
1877. J. Hawthorne, Garth, III. X. lxxxiv. 270. Butternut trees flung their black shadows.
2. Name of the genus Caryocar of S. America (esp. C. nuciferum) and its fruit.
1845. Don, Hortus Cantabrigiensis, 373.
1866. Treas. Bot., s.v. Caryocar, C. nuciferum, which produces the Souari or Butter-nuts, occasionally met with in English fruit-shops.
3. attrib. and quasi-adj. Of the color of the butter-nut (sense 1), i.e., of a brownish-grey. This was the color of the Southern uniform in the American War of Secession.
1861. Mrs. Stowe, Pearl Orr’s Isl. (ed. 3), 3. His coarse butternut-colored coat-flaps fluttering and snapping in the breeze.
1863. Ludlow, in Daily News, 5 Oct., 2/5. The still more atrocious murder of 20 fugitive negroes by guerillas wearing the butternut uniform at Sibley’s landing, in Missouri.
1864. Sala, in Daily Tel., 7 April, 5/4. The ‘butternut’ hue, I was informed, is a kind of warm grey.
1882. Woolson, For the Major, iii. in Harper’s Mag., Dec., 104/2. He was attired in a coat of … black, with butternut trousers.
b. Hence absol. (sb. omitted).
1863. Cornh. Mag., Jan., 102. The regiments in homespun gray and ‘butternut,’ that trail dustily through the high-streets [of Richmond] to swell distant camps.
1863. Times, 6 March, 5/2. A ‘Butternut’ is one who sympathizes with the South—one, in fact, who wears the uniform or livery of the Southern army.
1864. Nasby Papers, 20. ‘And air yoo a deserter frum a Suthrin rejyment,’ sez the benevelent old butternut who hed invested $10, in the deserter biznis.
