Blueberries

How to spell blueberries

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce blueberries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does blueberries mean?

1. nounThe small, round, dark blue edible fruits of certain shrubs, eaten fresh or used in cooking.

Blueberries in a sentence

• She stirred a handful of blueberries into the morning porridge.

• The market stall sold punnets of fresh blueberries at a discount.

Where does blueberries come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of blueberry, a compound that simply joins the colour word 'blue' to the fruit word 'berry'. The 'berry' half descends from the Old English 'berie', meaning a small, juicy, stoneless fruit, a thoroughly native word with relatives across the Germanic languages such as Dutch 'bes' and German 'Beere'. The 'blue' half came into English from Old French 'bleu', though that itself traces back to a Germanic colour root, so both parts share an ancient northern European ancestry. The combined name 'blueberry' is a relative latecomer, appearing in North American English around the early 1800s to describe the native fruit that early settlers harvested in great quantities. The spelling trap lives in the plural: 'berry' ends in a consonant plus 'y', so the 'y' turns to 'i' and gains '-es', giving 'berries' rather than the mistaken 'berrys', and the doubled 'r' must be kept throughout.

How the word is built

• blue (the colour, from Germanic)
• berry (from Old English berie: a small fruit)
• -es (plural; the y changes to i before -es)