Whimberry

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A small dark blue wild berry that grows on low shrubs in heathland and moorland, often called a bilberry in Britain
2. The edible blue-black fruit of a low moorland shrub, related to the blueberry and commonly picked from heather-covered hills
3. A tiny wild berry with deep blue skin and sweet dark flesh, gathered from heaths and moors in northern England and Scotland

Etymology: Whimberry is a plant-name that began as a version of "wineberry," and its earliest ancestor in English was simply "grape." Old English "wīnberġe" and "wīnberie" were built from "wīne" (wine) and "berie" (berry), with the sense "wine-berry," and the same compound was used for grapes before it narrowed to the plant. The first element came from Latin "vīnum," borrowed into Germanic early on, which means the English name for the plant is a Latin loan wrapped around a Germanic word for berry. The shift from "winberry" to "whimberry" was not a single step. Vowels before consonant clusters tend to shorten, which explains the change from "wineberry" to "winberry," and in some regions the spelling was also pulled toward "whin," the name for gorse, a prickly shrub. Other forms were reshaped as "windberry," which was reinterpreted as "wind" plus "berry" and has no real link to the original word.

Synonyms: bilberry, whortleberry, blaeberry