Cherries
nounMore than one cherry, the small round red or dark fruit that grows on a stalk and contains a single stone.
How to spell cherries
8 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce cherries
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does cherries mean?
- nounMore than one cherry, the small round red or dark fruit that grows on a stalk and contains a single stone.
Cherries in a sentence
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She rinsed a bowl of fresh cherries before adding them to the tart.
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The market sold ripe cherries by the kilo all through July.
Where does cherries come from?
Language of origin: French
The story behind cherries is a famous accident of mishearing. The word traces back to the Greek kerasos, the name of the cherry tree, which passed into Latin as cerasus and then into the language of northern France as cherise. When English borrowed cherise in the medieval period, speakers wrongly assumed that the final -s sound marked a plural, just as it does in 'apples' or 'pears'. They then trimmed off that -s to make what they imagined was the singular, producing 'cherry' as a brand-new back-formed word. The plural 'cherries' then follows the ordinary English rule that turns a final -y into -ies, which is why the spelling shifts from cherry to cherries. The same family of words gave Italian 'ciliegia' and the colour name in 'cherry red'.
How the word is built
- cherr- (the fruit, from cherry)
- -ies (plural of a noun ending in -y)
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