Wineberie

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A prickly bramble shrub native to East Asia that bears edible red berries covered in fine bristly hairs
2. A thorny plant of the raspberry genus from East Asia, now invasive in North America, producing red fruit
3. Japanese wineberry is a bramble with reddish stems and sticky bristles that yields small, tart red berries

Etymology: Wineberry is a plant name whose spelling still shows its Middle English ancestry. The shrub, Rubus phoenicolasius, is a bramble native to East Asia (China, Japan, Korea) that was brought to North America and Europe in the 19th century and later escaped cultivation. Its berries are a glossy, bright red, which is the source of the name: "wine" refers to that colour, a sense recorded in English since Old English times, and "berry" is the ordinary word for the fruit. The spelling "berie" with a final "-e" is an older form of "berry", as English spelling of the period often kept a final vowel letter. Because the plant was introduced from Asia, the name is a fairly recent coinage for a species whose berries are otherwise known as "Japanese wineberry."