Why Aren't Strawberries Actually Considered Berries?

It's hard to beat the sweet taste of a perfectly juicy, sun-ripened strawberry. The seed-studded red fruit is easily the most popular berry in the United States, with the average American consuming over seven pounds of strawberries in 2022 alone (per Statista). There's just one small problem: Botanically speaking, strawberries aren't berries at all. Most people think of berries as small, sweet fruits. They're ideal for blending into smoothies, baking into cobblers, or you can whip berries with butter for the ultimate toast spread. However, science has a very different idea of what qualifies as a berry, and it excludes most fruits with "berry" in their name — including strawberries.

This calls for a small science lesson (it'll be fun, we promise). Botanists generally define fruit as the ripe ovary of a plant flower. True berries are simple fruits, meaning they develop from one ovary of a single flower. Strawberries, in contrast, develop from multiple ovaries of a single flower, meaning they are classified as aggregate fruits or accessory fruits.

The full botanical definition of a berry is a "simple fleshy fruit" (per Britannica) with at least one seed inside. This means bananas, kiwis, avocados, and even cucumbers can be scientifically categorized as berries. However, despite being fleshy and seedy, strawberries are not considered berries because they are aggregate fruits. If your mind is already spinning, here's the cherry on top — raspberries and blackberries are also aggregate fruits, not berries. The only common "berries" that are true berries are cranberries and blueberries.

So, if strawberries aren't berries, why are they called strawberries? This question takes us from botany to linguistics. People were talking about berries before botanists started categorizing fruits based on ovary count. The term berry is derived from the Old English word "berie," which dates back to at least the 12th century. This word was originally used to describe grapes, but over time it became an umbrella term for many small fruits somewhat similar in size to grapes.

Nowadays, if you're not in a botany class, the word berry is generally agreed upon to mean a small, fleshy, usually edible fruit – a category that most definitely includes all the expensive berries your kids won't stop eating. The strawberry is just one example of how the botanical, culinary, and legal definitions of foods don't always align. For example, you might have heard that tomatoes are technically a fruit – a berry, in fact – but if you ask the United States Supreme Court, tomatoes are a vegetable. So even though strawberries aren't considered berries botanically, we can confidently say that they're still the berry best in our hearts.