Pomes

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A type of fruit originating from trees that typically yield round, edible varieties, including members of the genus Malus such as apples and pears, and generally refers to fruits characterized by a seed-containing core within a fleshy body
2. This term encompasses round edible fruits primarily produced by trees in the family Rosaceae, highlighting species like apples and their relatives, which have a central core containing seeds
3. A kind of fruit that has a firm outer layer and a central core surrounded by soft flesh, commonly coming from trees like apple or pear trees

Etymology: "Pomes" is simply the plural of "pome," so the story belongs to the singular. "Pome" came into Middle English as "pome," meaning fruit or, oddly, a meatball, borrowed from Old French "pome," which meant apple. Behind that lies Latin "pōmum," a general word for tree fruit, which is also the ancestor of "pomme," the French for apple. That makes "pome" a doublet of "pomme," two words descended from the same Latin source that entered the language by different routes. English kept the older-looking form for a botanical category, the fleshy fruit built around a core of seeds, such as the apple and the pear. The word has never meant just any fruit in English; it names a specific kind of fruit, though its Latin origin was broader.

Synonyms: fruit, apple, pear, berry, drupe