chestnuts

noun

plural of chestnut
as in clichés
an idea or expression that has been used by many people an op-ed piece that's offers nothing but warmed-over chestnuts for solving the city's financial woes

Synonyms & Similar Words

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Antonyms & Near Antonyms

Example Sentences

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Recent Examples of chestnuts There are also some surviving large American chestnuts, some of which have heritable blight resistance. — Steve Strauss, The Conversation, 22 July 2026 Mature trees donate an encyclopedia of species, including the regional pines and chestnuts planted on instruction of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria in the 1700s. — Nielsen Dinwoodie, Forbes.com, 20 July 2026 An opening scene flashes back to a horrific family murder in which one of two surviving foster children is found in the basement filled with figures constructed from chestnuts. — Culture Critic, Los Angeles Times, 15 July 2026 Week 3 Add in pumpkin, tomatoes, chestnuts, bananas, and berries. — Emily Kay Votruba, EverydayHealth.com, 29 June 2026 In the medieval town of Belvì, men roast chestnuts—marroni—over an open fire in a frying pan the size of a swimming pool and then serve them to the crowd by shoveling them into troughs. — IEEE Spectrum, 7 May 2026 Canned Water Chestnuts Fresh water chestnuts, while hard to find, are sweeter and juicier than canned varieties, with a cleaner, more pronounced crunch. — Katie Rosenhouse, Southern Living, 6 Mar. 2026 Almonds, chestnuts, walnuts, hazelnuts, chia, and flax are rich in magnesium and omega-3s, helping to support nervous-system and hormonal balance. — Mélanie Defouilloy, Vogue, 24 Feb. 2026 One programmer joked that his early sketches of the Goombas looked like chestnuts— kuri in Japanese, which is why Goombas are known in Japan as kuribo. — Literary Hub, 11 Feb. 2026
Recent Examples of Synonyms for chestnuts
  1. bromides
  2. tropes
  3. proverbs
  4. platitudes
  5. banalities
  6. sayings
  7. truisms
  8. shibboleths
Noun
  • The president used similar bromides in private calls to assuage allies, including Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, before launching the war in February, according to people familiar with the conversations.
    — Vivian Salama, The Atlantic, 3 June 2026
  • While these songs might appear to be somewhat straightforward EBM that wear their politics on their latex sleeve, there’s a level of ambiguity at work that moves Kissing Luck Goodbye past its own bromides and into deeper artistic territory.
    — Sadie Sartini Garner, Pitchfork, 16 Apr. 2026
Definition of bromides
Noun
  • The book pays homage to all your classic romance tropes — fake relationship, enemies to lovers, boy next door — but spins them on their head in this new take on what happily ever after looks like.
    — Matt Grobar, Deadline, 31 July 2026
  • The series premiering on Starz is, more than anything else, blandly familiar, mining all the tropes of several popular genres without finding anything distinctive in the combination.
    — Daniel Fienberg, HollywoodReporter, 30 July 2026
Definition of tropes
Noun
  • The third film in director Éric Rohmer’s series Comedies and Proverbs, Pauline at the Beach explores the emotions (and delusions) around summer love.
    — Air Mail, Air Mail, 20 June 2026
  • For nine months, Erasmus spent his short nights in a modest dorm and his long days in the print shop, expanding on his collection of proverbs Adagiorum chiliades while Aldus proofread, craftsman carefully laying sets of print and rolling paper through the press.
    — Literary Hub, Literary Hub, 24 Nov. 2025
Definition of proverbs
Noun
  • Leaders must understand grief's unique, individual nature, avoiding assumptions or platitudes.
    — Mena Mirhom, Forbes.com, 29 July 2026
  • The shorter run time also means some themes get reduced into syrup; the platitudes come as fast and furious as Tao and Elle’s breakups and makeups, with too little space to breathe in between.
    — Gemma Wilson, Boston Herald, 19 July 2026
Definition of platitudes
Noun
  • And yet for God’s sake, just look at the man—at his dispiriting attempts at humor, his weirdly off-putting outfits, his incessant posting of banalities and faux profundities and extreme-right disinformation on social media.
    — Mark O’Connell, The New York Review of Books, 4 July 2026
  • Here, Laura, a magazine writer in London, drifts through old friendships, failed romances, and the gothic banalities of family life.
    — Air Mail, Air Mail, 20 June 2026
Definition of banalities
Noun
  • The next three chapters offer an anthology of sayings from rabbis who were active in the early centuries of the Common Era, including Hillel and Johanan ben Zakkai, among many other tannaim.
    — Encyclopedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Britannica, 24 July 2026
  • Where the most hopelessly corny sayings are painstakingly stitched into the equivalent of cloth graph paper by women who believe in the sayings and give the plaques to people who do not believe in the sayings.
    — Padgett Powell, Harpers Magazine, 30 June 2026
Definition of sayings
Noun
  • Spain’s success over the past five years has undermined many long-standing political-economic truisms.
    — Rogé Karma, The Atlantic, 1 June 2026
  • The play isn’t subtle; the final sequence leans hard on truisms about addiction and trauma, which are affecting but overly explicit.
    — Sheldon Pearce, New Yorker, 20 Feb. 2026
Definition of truisms
Noun
  • The director scores easy laughs off of modern-day progressive shibboleths such as gender-fluid pronouns, trigger warnings and Native American land acknowledgments.
    — Gustavo Arellano, Houston Chronicle, 25 Mar. 2026
Definition of shibboleths

Browse Nearby Words

chestnut
chestnuts
chests
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Cite this Entry

“Chestnuts.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/chestnuts. Accessed 4 Aug. 2026.

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More from Merriam-Webster on chestnuts

Nglish: Translation of chestnuts for Spanish Speakers

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