means A hard-shelled edible nut with a wrinkled, two-lobed kernel, grown on trees of the genus Juglans and eaten on its own or used in baking and cooking.

from From Old English 'walhhnutu', literally the 'foreign nut' — 'walh' meaning foreign or Welsh (the Anglo-Saxon word for the Celtic and Romanized peoples) plus 'hnutu', nut. The name marked it as the nut that arrived from abroad, by way of Gaul and Rome, to set it apart from the native hazelnut. That 'walh' root is the same one that, oddly enough, gave us 'Welsh' and the place-name 'Wales' — the nut and the nation share an ancestor meaning 'the foreigners.'