Berrying

Part of speech: verb, noun

Definitions

1. Picking or collecting wild fruit from bushes and brambles ; bearing or forming small fleshy fruits on plants ; the act of gathering edible fruit from shrubs in the wild
2. Harvesting edible fruits that grow on bushes or vines ; yielding small pulpy fruit as a plant does when it develops them ; foraging for the soft juicy fruits that cluster on shrubs
3. Searching the hedgerows and thickets for ripe fruit ; forming clusters of small succulent fruit on a plant ; the ongoing activity of collecting wild berries from the countryside

Etymology: Berrying is simply the -ing form of "berry", so its history is the history of the noun. The Old English "berġe" was a word for the small, pulpy fruit we still call a berry, and it descends from a Proto-Germanic root that also gave German "Beere", Icelandic "ber" and Danish "bær". Its ancestry is a little unusual: the Old English word for a berry is closely related to a homophone-looking word for a hill, since the Old English "beorg" meant mountain or mound, and the two words are sometimes linked through "barrow", a burial mound. The verb sense of picking wild fruit grew naturally out of that noun. The -ing ending turns "berry" into a continuous activity, so "going berrying" means gathering berries in the wild, the sense the verb carries today. The slang "berry" for a police car, by contrast, is a later and separate development, probably from the lights on the car roofs.