Mulberry
nounA dark red or purple soft fruit, or the tree that bears it.
How to spell mulberry
8 letters · 3 syllables
How to pronounce mulberry
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does mulberry mean?
- nounA dark red or purple soft fruit, or the tree that bears it.
Mulberry in a sentence
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She noticed one ripe mulberry hanging from the tree in the garden.
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The juice of the mulberry left a deep purple stain on his shirt.
Where does mulberry come from?
Language of origin: Latin
Mulberry traces back to the Latin morum, meaning the fruit of the mulberry tree, which itself echoes the Greek moron for the same dark berry. Old English took the word in as morberie or murberie, simply joining the Latin element to the native word berry. Over time the first 'r' shifted into an 'l', a common sound change called dissimilation, where two similar sounds close together (here two r sounds) drift apart to be easier to say; this is exactly why we now write 'mul' rather than 'mur', and it is the small spelling trap worth remembering. The same morum root survives in the botanical genus name Morus and in words like 'morello', the dark cherry. By the late medieval period the modern shape was settled, and the word came to cover both the tree and its sweet, staining fruit.
How the word is built
- mul- (from Latin morum: mulberry)
- berry (fruit)
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