The word berry comes from the Old English berie, which originally meant “grape.” As the English language spread to the Americas with colonization, many native grape-shaped fruits that grew in bunches took on the berry suffix: blueberry, cranberry, elderberry, etc.
Strawberries and raspberries aren't really berries in the botanical sense. They are derived from a single flower with more than one ovary, making them an aggregate fruit. True berries are simple fruits stemming from one flower with one ovary and typically have several seeds.
The pome fruits produced by plants in subtribe Pyrinae of family Rosaceae, such as apples and pears, have a structure (the core) in which tough tissue clearly separates the seeds from the outer softer pericarp. Pomes are not berries.
Some fruits that are called berries in English are not true berries by the use of words above. These include raspberries, strawberry, sutberry, blackberries, cranberries, and boysenberries. Some true berries do not have berry in their name. These include tomatoes, bananas, eggplants, guavas, pomegranates and chillies.
someone or something very attractive or unusual. SEE MORE. verb (used without object), ber·ried, ber·ry·ing.
The ellipsoidal kiwi fruit is a true berry and has furry brownish green skin. The firm translucent green flesh has numerous edible purple-black seeds embedded around a white centre.
What Makes a Berry a Berry? A berry, which has a fleshy exocarp (rind) and a fleshy mesocarp (pulp), is any soft and fleshy fruit that comes from a flower with a single ovary. This means avocados, tomatoes, bananas, and oranges are all technically berries.
A pineapple is neither a pine nor an apple, but a fruit consisting of many berries that have grown together. This also means that Pineapples are not a single fruit, but a group of berries that have fused together. The technical term for this is a “multiple fruit” or a “collective fruit”.
It turns out berry is actually a botanical term, not a common English one. Blackberries, mulberries, and raspberries are not berries at all, but bananas, pumpkins, avocados and cucumbers are. So what makes a berry? Well, a berry has seeds and pulp (properly called “pericarp”) that develop from the ovary of a flower.
The avocado is a fruit. In botanical terms, it's a single-seeded berry that grows on trees in warmer climates and is native to Mexico.
Strawberries, like many flowering plants, can produce both sexually and asexually. Farmers rely on both traits: sexual reproduction produces fruit, whereas asexual reproduction provides breeders with clones of useful strawberry varieties.
Botanically, the coconut is classified as a fruit--more specifically, it is a drupe. Drupes are more commonly called stone fruits. Other stone fruits include peaches and nectarines; blackberries and raspberries are drupes comprised of aggregates of drupelets.
The elongated tough-skinned fruits of the family Cucurbitaceae, including watermelons, cucumbers, and gourds, are a type of berry referred to as pepos.
cof·fee /ˈkôfē,ˈkäfē/ noun The berries harvested from species of Coffea plants. Everyone recognizes a roasted coffee bean, but you might not recognize an actual coffee plant. Coffee trees are pruned short to conserve their energy and aid in harvesting, but can grow to more than 30 feet (9 meters) high.
While there are such things as male and female plants, and even male and female parts of the same flower, there is no such thing as gender (or sex) in fruit.
Avocados are one of the few fruits (yes, technically they're a fruit, not a veggie) that contain healthy unsaturated fats. These fats help lower undesirable LDL cholesterol when eaten in place of saturated fat. The popular Haas avocado, which has dark-green, nubby skin, grows year-round in California.
The botanical classification: Cucumbers are fruit.
A botanical fruit would have at least one seed and grow from the flower of the plant. With this definition in mind, cucumbers are classified as fruit because they contain tiny seeds in the middle and grow from the flower of the cucumber plant.
In addition, to be a berry, a fruit must have two or more seeds. Thus, a cherry, which has just one seed, doesn't make the berry cut, Jernstedt said. Rather, cherries, like other fleshy fruit with thin skin and a central stone that contains a seed, are called drupes, she said.
Pineapple is a type of composite fruit, which means it has developed from many ovaries and other floral parts. Pineapple is a type of sorosis fruit that is developed of catkins, spikes, or spadix-type inflorescences.
Bananas Are Botanically Berries
As surprising as this may sound, botanically speaking, bananas are considered berries. The category a fruit falls under is determined by the part of the plant that develops into the fruit.
Berries are not all tiny, and they're not all sweet. Surprisingly, eggplants, tomatoes and avocados are botanically classified as berries.
The actual fruits of the strawberry are the yellow-green seeds (nutlets), which are distributed on the surface. Therefore, from a botanical point of view, the strawberry is a nuts fruit, and that is why it does not contain a seed inside. Botanically speaking, berries are fruits whose seeds lie in the pulp.
Blueberries and cranberries are close cousins and are in fact not berries at all; they belong instead to a class of fruits known as epigynous or false berries. Unlike a true berry, the fruit grows from beneath the rest of the flower parts, and as the fruit ripens the flower stays attached and ripens as well.
Cucumbers are another type of berry, even though they seem more like a veggie! "Cucumbers are 'pepos. ' "Interestingly, pumpkins, zucchini, oranges, tangerines, lemons, limes, cantaloupes and watermelons are also pepos," says Hultin. And they are berries, as they have one single ovary.
Cucumber is usually considered a vegetable because of how it's used in the culinary world. However, as it grows from flowers and contains seeds, it's botanically a fruit. Regardless of its fruit or vegetable status, there are countless ways to enjoy cucumber in your cooking or beauty routine.