Word.ws English Dictionary

dogberry

UK/ˈdɒɡbəɹi/US/ˈdɔɡˌbɛɹi/

dogberry noun: the berry of the dogwood.

Noun (1)

dogberry (plural dogberries)

  1. The berry of the dogwood.
  2. Clintonia borealis (yellow clintonia)

Noun (2) capitalized: Dogberry

Dogberry (plural Dogberries)

  1. A pompous, foolish or self-important official.
    • It would be interesting to know how many village Dogberries there were like Thomas Law, the constable of Quendon, Essex, whose reaction in 1651 on being informed of a robbery was to call on the astrologer, William Hills, ‘with an intent to hear what he might say, so that he might make his search...1971, Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Folio Society, published 2012, page 333

Forms of dogberry

pluraldogberries
pluralDogberries

Origin of dogberry

See dogwood and berry. Compare also dog rose. Compare German Hundbeere (“bittersweet”), Ancient Greek κυνόσβατος (kunósbatos, “evergreen rose”), Lithuanian šùnobelė (“buckthorn”), Italian mela canina (“mandrake”).

From Dogberry, the name of a character in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing (1600).

Words formed from dogberry

Questions about dogberry

What does dogberry mean?
Dogberry means the berry of the dogwood.
What part of speech is dogberry?
Dogberry is a noun.
How do you pronounce dogberry?
Dogberry is pronounced /ˈdɒɡbəɹi/ (UK).
What is the plural of dogberry?
The plural of dogberry is dogberries.

Words near dogberry in the dictionary

  1. dogback
  2. dogballs
  3. dogbane
  4. dogbanes
  5. dogberries
  6. dogberry
  7. dogberryism
  8. dogberryisms
  9. dogbit
  10. dogbits
  11. dogbolt

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dogberry (page history and authors); Dogberry (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:

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