blueberry

Etymology

It is a compound from English blue + berry, named for the colour of the fruit.^[2][3][4][5] Blue is from Old French bleu (“pale, light-coloured; blue”), of Germanic origin,^[3] and berry is from Old English berie (“berry, grape”), from Proto-Germanic *basją, of unknown origin.^[3]

Earliest recorded meaning

The sweet blue berry of shrubs of the genus Vaccinium: 1594, in an Act of the Scottish Parliament.^[2][6] Etymonline dates the American use to about 1775,^[3] the Collegiate gives 1709,^[7] and Dictionary.com dates the word to 1700–10.^[4]

Semantic evolution

From 1785 the word also named the plant itself, especially the highbush blueberry, Vaccinium corymbosum, and its cultivated varieties.^[2][8] Hendrickson notes that early colonists in America gathered the wild berries, calling them "blues", "whortleberries" and "bilberries", and that cultivated blueberries are largely a 20th-century development: from 1909 the plant breeder Frederick Coville worked with Elizabeth C. White in New Jersey to breed large-fruited highbush varieties.^[5] In American regional use the name was also given to the blue cohosh, a different plant.^[9] In Australia and New Zealand it is applied to native plants with blue berries,^[10][11][6] and in Canadian slang it names a variety of marijuana.^[12]

Timeline

• 1594 – the blue berry of a Vaccinium shrub.^[2][6]
• 1785 – the shrub that bears these berries.^[2][8]
• 1873 – in the United States, the blue cohosh.^[9]

Meanings

Noun

1. The sweet, edible, blue or blackish berry of several North American shrubs of the genus Vaccinium: muffins full of blueberries.^{[6][13][14][2]}
2. Any of the shrubs that bear this fruit.^{[6][13][14][2]}
3. In Australia and New Zealand, any of several native plants with blue berries.^[6][11][10]

Word family

• highbush blueberry
• lowbush blueberry

Related words

• bilberry
• huckleberry
• whortleberry
• blackberry

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
4. ^ a b Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
5. ^ a b Hendrickson, Robert (2008), The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 4th ed., New York: Facts on File
6. ^ a b c d e f Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
7. ^ Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (2003), 11th ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
8. ^ a b Kay, Christian; Roberts, Jane; Samuels, Michael; Wotherspoon, Irené, eds. (2009), Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press; online edition (2024)
9. ^ a b Cassidy, Frederic G. & Joan Houston Hall (eds.) (1985–2002), Dictionary of American Regional English, vols I–IV, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
10. ^ a b Morris, Edward E. (1898), Austral English: A Dictionary of Australasian Words, Phrases and Usages, London: Macmillan
11. ^ a b Deverson, Tony; Kennedy, Graeme, eds. (2005), The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary, Auckland: Oxford University Press
12. ^ Dalzell, Tom; Victor, Terry, eds. (2013), The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 2nd ed., London: Routledge
13. ^ a b Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
14. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1992), 3rd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin