Word.ws English Dictionary

chokecherry

chokecherry noun: any of several American wild cherry trees, especially Prunus virginiana.

chokecherry: any of several American wild cherry trees, especially Prunus virginiana
Image: Famartin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

chokecherry (plural chokecherries)

  1. Any of several American wild cherry trees, especially Prunus virginiana.
    • The youngster-loved chokecherry grows both as a bushy shrub and as a tree seldom higher than 22 feet, its branches bending with clusters of darkening red or blackish purple berrylike drupes . . .1981, Bradford Angier, Field Guide to Medicinal Wild Plants
  2. The fruit of this plant.
    • There were handfuls of chokecherries for dessert and a lemonade made from sumac.2013, Philipp Meyer, The Son, Simon & Schuster, published 2014, page 72

Forms of chokecherry

pluralchokecherries
alternative formchoke cherry

Origin of chokecherry

From choke + cherry, so called from the extreme astringency of the fresh fruit.

Questions about chokecherry

What does chokecherry mean?
Chokecherry means any of several American wild cherry trees, especially Prunus virginiana.
What part of speech is chokecherry?
Chokecherry is a noun.
What is the plural of chokecherry?
The plural of chokecherry is chokecherries.

Words near chokecherry in the dictionary

  1. chokebore
  2. chokebored
  3. chokebores
  4. chokeboring
  5. chokecherries
  6. chokecherry
  7. chokecoil
  8. chokecoils
  9. choked
  10. choked a darkie
  11. choked back

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chokecherry (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “chokecherry.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chokecherry. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.