Word of the Day: Strawberry

strawberry (straw-ber-ee) - noun

A strawberry is "any of various low-growing plants of the genus Fragaria, having white flowers and an aggregate fruit that consists of a red fleshy edible receptacle and numerous seedlike fruitlets."

First used in the written form before the year 1000.  The origins of the word strawberry have long puzzled etymologists.  The two most plausible suggestions are that the runners put out by strawberry plants, long trailing shoots that spread across the ground, reminded people of straws laid on the floor;  and that word preserves a now defunct sense of straw ('small pieces of straw or chaff'), supposedly in allusion to hte fruit's 'chafflike' external seeds.

Photo by Muffet