gooseberry
pronunciation
How to pronounce gooseberry in British English:
UK [ˈgʊzbəri]
How to pronounce gooseberry in American English:
US [ˈgusberi]
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- Noun:
- spiny Eurasian shrub having greenish purple-tinged flowers and ovoid yellow-green or red-purple berries
- currant-like berry used primarily in jams and jellies
Word Origin
- gooseberry
- gooseberry: [16] Probably, when all is said and done, gooseberry is simply a compound of goose and berry. But no one has ever been able to explain satisfactorily why the gooseberry should have been named after the goose, and there has been no lack of alternative etymological suggestions for the word – notably that goose is an alteration of an old dialect word for the ‘gooseberry’, such as groser or gozell, borrowed ultimately from French groseille ‘gooseberry’.The quaint alteration goosegog dates from at least the early 19th century. Play gooseberry ‘be an uncomfortably superfluous third person with two lovers’ also goes back to the early 19th century, and may have originated in the notion of a chaperone (ostensibly) occupying herself with picking gooseberries while the couple being chaperoned did what they were doing (gooseberry-picker was an early 19th-century term for a ‘chaperone’).
- gooseberry (n.)
- type of thorny shrub with hairy fruit, cultivated in northern Europe, 1530s, with berry, but the first part is of uncertain origin; no part of the plant seems to suggest a goose. Watkins points to Old French grosele "gooseberry," which is from Germanic. Or perhaps from German Krausebeere or Kräuselbeere, related to Middle Dutch croesel "gooseberry," and to German kraus "crispy, curly" [Klein, etc.]. By either path it could be related to the Germanic group of words in kr-/cr- and meaning "to bend, curl; bent, crooked; rounded mass." Under this theory, gooseberry would be folk etymology. But OED editors find no reason to prefer this to a literal reading, because "the grounds on which plants and fruits have received names associating them with animals are so commonly inexplicable, that the want of appropriateness in the meaning affords no sufficient ground for assuming that the word is an etymological corruption." As slang for a fool, 1719, perhaps an extended form of goose (n.) in this sense, or a play on gooseberry fool in the cookery sense. Gooseberry also meant "a chaperon" (1837) and "a marvelous tale." Old Gooseberry for "the Devil" is recorded from 1796. In euphemistic explanations of reproduction to children, babies sometimes were said to be found under a gooseberry bush.
Example
- 1. I 've made a gooseberry fool for dinner .
- 2. This is a leap for a country where , as mr andrew puts it ( quoting sir michael howard , a military historian ) , attitudes to intelligence were akin to those on sex within marriage-discussing it is bad form . " Enemy agents are found under gooseberry bushes and intelligence is brought by the storks . "
- 3. The gooseberry bushes in my preserving garden allotment are still in their infancy and I 'm not expecting much fruit from them until next year .
- 4. Ripe gooseberry and passion fruit aromas are balanced with fresh herbal characters .
- 5. But few are familiar with other , more exotic berries , such as the gooseberry , blackberry , and raspberry .