Fruit

How to spell fruit

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fruit

What does fruit mean?

1. nounThe sweet, seed-bearing part of a plant eaten as food.
2. nounThe reward, result, or outcome of work or effort.

Fruit in a sentence

• She packed an apple and other fruit for the journey.

• The new house was the fruit of years of saving.

• The market sells fresh fruit and vegetables every morning.

• Their research finally bore fruit after a long delay.

Where does fruit come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin fructus, meaning 'produce' or 'enjoyment of something', which itself derived from the verb frui, 'to enjoy' or 'to use'. In its earliest Roman sense it referred broadly to any profit or yield that one could enjoy from labour or land, not just the sweet part of a plant. English borrowed it through Old French as 'fruit' in the 1100s and 1200s, keeping that French spelling with its unexpected 'ui' cluster, which is exactly the small trap for spellers today. The figurative sense, as in 'the fruits of one's labour', actually preserves the original Latin idea of reward and enjoyment. The same frui root lies behind the word 'fruition', and behind the older 'frugal', which described someone careful with what they produced.

How the word is built

• fruit (from Latin fructus: produce, enjoyment)