Strawberries

How to spell strawberries

12 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce strawberries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does strawberries mean?

1. nounThe plural of strawberry: small, sweet, red fruits with tiny seeds on the outside.

Strawberries in a sentence

• She picked a punnet of ripe strawberries at the farm.

• The dessert was topped with cream and fresh strawberries.

Where does strawberries come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English compound that goes all the way back to Old English, where it appeared as 'streawberige', a joining of 'streaw' (straw) and 'berige' (berry). The first element has long puzzled people, because the modern fruit is not obviously connected to straw; the most likely explanations are that the runners of the plant spread out across the ground like scattered straw, or that the small seed-like specks on the surface looked like tiny bits of chaff. The 'berry' element comes from the Old English 'berie', a general word for any small soft fruit, which is why English has so many '-berry' names. The plural here follows the regular English rule of changing a final 'y' to 'ies', so 'strawberry' becomes 'strawberries'. The spelling trap for adults is rarely the meaning and usually the mechanics: keeping the silent doubling of the 'r' in 'berries' and remembering the y-to-ies change rather than writing 'strawberrys'.

How the word is built

• straw (dried stalks)
• berry (fruit)
• -ies (plural of words ending in consonant
• y)