berry

Pluralberries

Formsberries, berrying, berried

1. 1
   small fruitnouncountable

   A small, juicy fruit belonging to any one of a great many varieties.

   Birds had stripped every berry from the bushes by the end of September.

   Wild berries ripen along the trail in late summer, though some of them are poisonous.

2. 2
   botanynouncountable

   In botany, a soft fruit that develops from a single ovary and whose seeds are not enclosed in pits.

   Botanically speaking, a banana counts as a berry, even though it looks nothing like one.

   The textbook classifies grapes, tomatoes, and peppers as true berries, each formed from a single ovary.

   Note

   The botanist's berry draws its boundary in a different place from the everyday word. A cherry is left out because its seed sits inside a hard pit, which makes it a drupe. Strawberries and raspberries are left out too, since they form from many ovaries or from flower tissue beyond the ovary. To tell the two uses apart, ask what the fruit grew from, not how small or soft it is.

3. 3
   coffee beannouncountable

   A coffee bean, one of the beans from which coffee is brewed.

   He tipped a sack of green berries into the roasting drum, and soon the shop smelled of fresh coffee.

   Before grinding the morning's coffee, she picked out every berry that looked cracked or scorched.

   Similarbean

4. 4
   pick fruitverbintransitive

   To pick berries, gathering them from the plants on which they grow.

   Every August our neighbors took the kids berrying up on the ridge.

   If the weather holds, we'll berry along the old logging road this afternoon.

   Note

   The verb behaves like fishing, often turning up as berrying after take: Grandma used to take us berrying. It takes no object, so the fruit stays unnamed; to name it, you pick blackberries instead. The past is berried, the y becoming ie before -ed but staying before -ing, as in Early American Life (1988): “I berried under a master strategist.”

5. 5
   fish eggnouncountable or uncountable

   One of the eggs of a fish or of a crustacean such as a crab.

   Fishermen must return any female lobster in berry to the water.

   The female crawfish keeps her berries clean by fanning fresh water over them.

   Similaregg

   Note

   Fishery rules and fishing talk keep this sense in use, mostly through one phrase: a female fish or crustacean carrying her eggs is in berry. There it keeps company with soft shell, as in female fish in berry, male fish in soft shell. Away from the phrase the word usually comes in the plural, a crab carrying her berries, for the whole clutch rather than a single egg.

6. 6
   bear fruitverbintransitive

   Of a bush, tree, or other plant, to bear or produce berries.

   Gardeners prune the bushes in late winter so they berry well the following summer.

   The rowan by the gate berried so heavily this fall that its branches drooped.

   Similarfruit

7. 7
   region of Franceproper noun · Berry

   A former province in the center of France.

   Many villages in Berry still hold on to the customs of the old province.

   After two weeks in Paris, they rented a farmhouse in Berry for the rest of the summer.

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