Strawberry

How to spell strawberry

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce strawberry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does strawberry mean?

1. nounA soft, sweet red fruit speckled with tiny seeds, grown on a low spreading plant.

Strawberry in a sentence

• She added a sliced strawberry to the bowl of cereal.

• Each strawberry was ripe enough to eat straight from the plant.

Where does strawberry come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes straight from Old English, where it appears as streawberige, a compound of streaw, meaning a dry stalk or stem of grass, and berige, meaning a small fleshy fruit. Scholars have long puzzled over why the dry, golden image of straw attached itself to this soft red fruit; the leading explanations point to the tiny seed-like specks scattered across its skin, which resemble bits of chaff or straw, or to the way the runners of the plant sprawl across the ground like strewn straw. The word was already in use well before the Norman Conquest, making it one of the oldest plant names in continuous English use. Because both halves are everyday native words, the spelling holds no foreign surprises; the only thing to watch is the join, where straw meets berry with a doubled r in the second element. Keeping the familiar word berry in mind is the simplest way to lock down the second half.

How the word is built

• straw (Old English streaw: dry stalk)
• berry (Old English berie: small fruit)