blackberry

Pluralblackberries

Formsblackberries, blackberrying, blackberried

1. 1
   nouncountable

   The soft fruit of the bramble shrub, formed from a cluster of small drupelets that turn black when fully ripe.

   She crushed a blackberry between her fingers, staining them deep purple.

   The hedgerows were heavy with blackberries by late August.

   Similarbramble, brambleberry

   Note

   Ripeness is the whole story here. Before the drupelets turn black they pass through red, and a berry still tinged red at the top is firm and tart rather than soft and sweet. Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars (2024) has a narrator who prefers them that way, which is a useful reminder that black marks the ripe berry, not every blackberry on the cane.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A prickly shrub of the Rubus fruticosus species aggregate or certain of its hybrids, grown or gathered for its fruit.

   The gardener cut the blackberry back hard before winter.

   Several blackberries had spread into a dense, thorny thicket.

   Similarbramble, brambleberry

   Note

   The plant takes its name from what it bears: Old English blæcberġe is simply black + berry, and Middle English blakberie meant "brambleberry." Bramble is the plant's other everyday name. Rubus fruticosus is an aggregate species, a cluster of closely related forms grouped under one name, which is why some hybrids count as blackberries too. Gardeners prune the shrub; cooks reach for its soft black fruit.

3. 3
   nouncolloquialcountable

   Any Rubus berry that is black or blackish, or the plant that produces it, used loosely without distinguishing the precise species.

   Out hiking, they lumped every black bramble fruit together as a blackberry.

   The kids picked what they called blackberries, though some were closer to dewberries.

4. 4
   verbintransitive

   To gather or forage for blackberries, typically from wild hedgerows in late summer.

   Families blackberry together once the hedgerows ripen in late summer.

   He spent the whole morning blackberrying in the lane behind the church.

   Note

   A noun turned into an outing, and most at home in the -ing form. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) leaves characters blackberrying in the sun, and in Thomas Keneally's Victim of the Aurora (2001) a family is blackberrying at the end of the garden. The verb takes no object: you go blackberrying, but you do not blackberry the hedge. The simple past also works, as in "we blackberried unceasingly."

5. 5
   noundialectalUKcountable

   In certain British dialects, the soft dark berry standardly called the blackcurrant.

   In the cottage garden the blackberry grew as a low, thornless bush between the gooseberries and the redcurrants, its sour fruit hanging in strings.

   They strained the blackberries through muslin to bottle the cordial.

   Similarblackcurrant

   Note

   A regional name that can mislead. In the general language the word means the bramble fruit, so a reader outside the dialect will picture thorny canes rather than a currant bush. Unless the setting makes the local usage clear, blackcurrant is the safer word. Keep the dialect name for reported speech or writing rooted in that region.

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