means The dry outer covering of a seed or fruit — and, by extension, the empty shell of anything once its substance is gone.

from From Middle English husk, likely a diminutive of hus, the old word for 'house' (the same root that gives us 'house' itself). The logic is homely and exact: a husk is the little house a seed lives in. The word has Germanic cousins — Dutch huls and German Hülse both mean 'pod' or 'shell' — all clustering around the same idea of a thing wrapped in its own modest dwelling.