earthberry
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: 0.00 in modern English
18
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
3
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A berry whose fruit lies upon the ground, in particular the strawberry (plant and fruit)
Example Sentences
- "The berries of the islands are sweet black currants, cranberries or goosh, strawberries and earthberries, together with the diddy, mountain, and malvina berries common to the Falkland Islands."
- "One time, the poor man had had no bread in the cupboard for a whole week, and the family lived on roots and stewed earthberries."
- "Wild Strawberries (Fragaria virginiana): A member of the rose family, the strawberry also has the nickname earthberry. No one could mistake this plant's succulent red and juicy berries."
- "It didn't take long for the waves of heat to reach him, and with them came the scents of tempanuts, earthberries, and honey."
- "One evening in Norway we had earthberries and cream just as Mr Haythornthwaite, the Englishman who visited our town when I was a child, would have had in Norway in the nine-teen-twenties."
- "The Portuguese word is also a mystery. In northern Europe it is simply the earth-berry due to the plant's habit of creeping along the ground."
Etymology
From earth + berry. First attested in the 1800s, mostly in texts about or translated from German or other languages which use similar terms, of which it is likely a calque: German Erdbeere, Dutch aardbei, Danish jordbær, etc. Compare Old English eorþberġe (“strawberry”, literally “earthberry”). Also compare Polish poziomka, Russian земляни́ка (zemljaníka) (related to земля́ (zemljá)).