Word.ws English Dictionary

crowberry

/ˈkɹəʊbəɹɪ/

crowberry noun: empetrum; a small genus of dwarf evergreen shrubs that bear edible fruit.

crowberry: empetrum; a small genus of dwarf evergreen shrubs that bear edible fruit
Image: Opioła Jerzy, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

crowberry (plural crowberries)

  1. Empetrum; a small genus of dwarf evergreen shrubs that bear edible fruit.
    Synonyms:
    crakeberry
    1. Empetrum nigrum; a species of crowberry.
      • Black crowberry. Empetrum nigrum. Crowberry Family. Fruit. — The black drupe is berrylike, globular, and incloses six to nine seedlike nutlets with a seed in each. The calyx is at the base and the stigma is at the apex. The drupes are solitary in the leaf axils. They are juicy, acid, edible, and...1905, Maude Gridley Peterson, How to Know Wild Fruits: A Guide to Plants When Not in Flower by Means of Fruit and Leaf, Macmillan, page 202
  2. A fruit of this plant.

Synonyms of crowberry

Forms of crowberry

pluralcrowberries

Origin of crowberry

From crow + berry; probably a calque of German Krähenbeere. Apparently so-called due to birds' fondness for the fruit. Yet the dark color (compare Old Norse blár (“blue-black, like a raven's sheen”)) may be the main or another factor; compare Inuktitut paurngaq (“crowberry”) (allegedly meaning "which looks like soot").

Words formed from crowberry

Questions about crowberry

What does crowberry mean?
Crowberry means empetrum; a small genus of dwarf evergreen shrubs that bear edible fruit.
What part of speech is crowberry?
Crowberry is a noun.
How do you pronounce crowberry?
Crowberry is pronounced /ˈkɹəʊbəɹɪ/ (UK).
What is the plural of crowberry?
The plural of crowberry is crowberries.

Words near crowberry in the dictionary

  1. crowbar hotel
  2. crowbarred
  3. crowbarring
  4. crowbars
  5. crowberries
  6. crowberry
  7. crowbill
  8. crowbills
  9. Crowborough
  10. Crowcombe
  11. Crowcombe Heathfield

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: crowberry (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-crowberry.wav.

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