Theories on the etymology of 'strawberry' | Hacker News Reader

Theories on the etymology of 'strawberry'

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I always thought they had their name because we in Scandinavia collect wild strawberries on straws. See e.g.,

http://promenaderpalandet.blogspot.com/2009/06/jordgubbar-pa...

https://www.instagram.com/p/5FaadlgU3N/

http://www.tvillingmormor.com/?p=248

https://www.google.com/search?q=jordgubbe+str%C3%A5&newwindo...

I'm not saying you're wrong, and I'm not very knowledgeable about language evolution but strawberries are called "earth berries" in Scandinavian languages.

Btw, also in Germanic languages.

Scandinavian languages, except Finnish and Sami, are Germanic :-)

Finland, depending on who you ask, is a Nordic country but not a part of Scandinavia.

Yes, especially when talking about languages and culture although these countries have many geographic, economic and social similarities. Same with Iceland, although Icelandic is Germanic. Even if so, Finnish is an officially recognized minority language of Sweden with almost 500,000 speakers. Then again, probably Arabic will overtake Finnish as largest minority language soon but I would hesitate before calling it a Scandinavian language.

The scandinavian words for strawberry, "jordbær" in Danish/Norwegian (directly translated "earth berries" or "ground berries"), "jordgubbe" in Swedish (earth lump) are believed to be named such because they grow close to the ground.

Most of the other compound fruits or berries eaten in Scandinavia/England grow on trees or bushes.

"Aardbei" in Dutch roughly translates to earthberry

Even in Old English strawberries were called earthberries: eorþberige

I was thinking the exact same thing, and was expecting to read about that! I literally read the article just to satisfy my expectations! But alas, no. (And I'm from Norway, where it's called jordbær)

Maybe Alf Prøysen has something to do with it? http://www.letssingit.com/prøysen-alf-lyrics-vise-for-gærne-...

This was briefly touched on in the article:

"Strawberries are often stringed, that is, collected and threaded on thin straws, another vague clue."

That's so cool! The word for strawberries un Albanian is "Dredheza", which means roughly "a twisted small edible thing"

The literal translation is more like 'soil berries'.

Menar du "jordgubbar" eller "smultron"? :P People here don't know about "smultron", the little wild strawberries that are a billion times better than plain old "jordgubbar", the things you buy at ICA.

Jeg mener "skovjordbær" på dansk (som vel er "smultron" på svensk).

This is how we picked wild strawberries as kids:

http://pilt.toidutare.ee/pilt/06.2012/4249/originaal.jpg?t=1...

http://www.eesti.ca/pics/2010/07/28943_4.jpg

Coincidence? I don't think so!

Same here across the gulf, that's how we collected them as kids.

BTW, the berries in the pictures are indeed wild strawberries (Fragaria vesca), which are quite different from garden strawberries (Fragaria × ananassa). The wild ones are very aromatic, although (being wild) less consistent in taste. It's considered a different fruit across here (even if it is not really a fruit but an "aggregate accessory fruit").

Also in Swedish, it has a completely different name (garden strawberry is "jordgubb" while the wild one is "smultron").

Garden strawberries in Scandinavia and Baltics (Sweden, Estonia, Finland) are also quite different from the garden strawberries that come from France or Spain or anywhere in the USA. In my mouth, the difference between an American garden strawberry and a Scandinavian one is about as big as the difference between an apple and an orange. (Taste, structure). I guess it mostly comes from the plant variants used, and how much light the plant gets in a day during the growing season.

Finally, Estonian for "strawberry pie" (maasikapirukas) is Finnish for "earth-swine devilish" so perhaps there's something to that thing about earth, after all.

>Finally, Estonian for "strawberry pie" (maasikapirukas) is Finnish for "earth-swine devilish" so perhaps there's something to that thing about earth, after all.

The pirukas part might come from baltic - pyragas and/or slavic - pirog.

Naturally. Same root also in the Finnish word (piirakka).

In fact, it seems that Fenno-Ugric words for strawberry also refer to earth, just like Germanic. Finnish "mansikka" and Estonian "maasika" both start like "maa, manner, mansi, mantu". So it appears the meaning has been translated long, long ago, it's not borrowed as a word that sounds the same.

(For those who don't know, Fenno-Ugric languages like Finnish, Estonian or Hungarian are of a completely different origin than Indo-European languages which include Germanic, Romanic and Slavic languages. English and Russian are close relatives and Hindi is their cousin, while Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are a strange family to them. And then there is the European orphan, Basque language.)

To put it more graphically: http://www.theguardian.com/education/gallery/2015/jan/23/a-l...

Yes, that was nice (but as you can see, the Basque language didn't make it, being both unrelated and small).

Does seem rather obvious when you see it like that.

Were any other berries gathered thusly? If not, I'm not sure why they were so quick to disregard.

It also seems highly compatible with them being wild originally, and still being called strawberries. You probably wouldn't get them like that on a farm.

According to my (English) Gardener's Almanac:

Strawberries are called "Strawberries" because, traditionally, growers place a straw "mulch" under the plants so that the berries don't come into contact with the ground. This prevents rotting and mildew from the moist soil.

Now days, plastic mulch is often used instead, but you still see straw being used too.

http://c8.alamy.com/comp/B7MY41/english-strawberry-crop-in-f...

It was mentioned in the article that the naming predates cultivated strawberries.

All I could find in the article was this:

If straw was ever used in protecting strawberries, this practice would have been important only in gardening, but before naming the garden berry, whose cultivation is late, people gathered strawberries in the wild.

This wording suggests to me that the name came after cultivation? In old english they were apparently known as "Earthberries".

Secondly, straw certainly is used in protecting strawberries - and has been for a long time!

The sentence you quoted states that the name came before cultivation, which occurred later in time.

Basically "Using straw would only happen in gardened berries, but that wasn't done until long after people gathered strawberries (by that name) from the wild".

My reading of that sentence gives the opposite meaning to your interpretation!

But, it's badly written and perhaps the author meant is different to how it reads.

How about the cultivation of "straw"? I mow one meadow by my parents' home once every year or two and wild strawberries and raspberries survive in the undergrowth. In another meadow which I mow three or for times a year only the starwberries remain.

Strawberries have to be my most successful allotment crop: https://www.flickr.com/photos/edgecombe/4735353542/in/datepo...

They look succulent. Do you use slug pellets?

The last time I tried growing them was when I was a child. The built up excitement of fruiting ended in anticlimax as I found them all eaten one morning, before I had been able to pick them. My mother said slugs got them.

Now I wonder about that comment.

No problems with the strawberries but pretty much everything else gets attacked by them.

I think the strawberries aren't affected so much because they aren't a target for long, we pick them every other day through the season.

If they were all gone overnight I guess something else took them e.g. birds.

If snails took them you'd see strawberry "skins" still hanging there.

Edit: tip for removing snails without using questionable chemicals: pour beer into something that is easy for snails to enter. Leave out in the strawberry crop overnight. At least around here snails love beer and drink themselves to death.

If they were all gone it's not likely birds either. Birds can't "see" the red pigmentation in strawberries.

Which birds are you talking about? Birds have excellent color vision.

Yeah I'm sorry I don't know where I got that idea!!!

That said, I grow a lot of these berries and for some reason the birds never go near em.

It was definitely the mother the entire time.

There is some evidence that snails and slugs respond to culling with increased breeding, instead i run a snail heaven,I plant sacrificial crops in front of my prime concern and if I find any wanderers I put them there, works a treat, remember slugs and snails are essential to release some of the needed chemicals from rotting vegetation,they are not the enemy!

Do you have a picture of that? That sounds cool. What do you plant there that's more delicious than strawberries ?

salad leaves, not much going on at the moment missed the boat this year and settled mostly for sunflowers, got a few pots but no visits from snails or the 'snails without houses' as my Austrian friend calls them :)

Depending on where you grew up, a more likely culprit is deer. I can't grow much of any berries/flowers/some bushes because as soon as they look like they are doing great, one night all of the blooms/berries/leaves are mysteriously stripped off.

> There are two theories as to the true origin of the word, both deriving from its first syllable. One explanation hinges on a particular meaning of "straw" — a particle of straw, chaff, or mote — describing the appearance of the achenes (tiny yellow seeds) scattered over the surface of the berry. Another view says it comes from "stray" or "strew," designating the spread of the plant's runners (slender tendrils), in that in an unchecked field of strawberries the plants appear to have been strewn across the ground with their runners straying everywhere. This second explanation is the more popular.

http://www.snopes.com/language/notthink/strawberry.asp

Given that the word is more than 1000 years old, it's not surprising that the word 'straw' had different usage at the time strawberries got their name.

There is a whole family of plants called "bedstraw" that were traditionally used for stuffing beds, and they do have slender tendrils all over. This name is quite old in english (medieval-ish).

If you take a straw and poke through the bottom tip and up - removes the stem ;)

Wow, this is ridiculously imprecise. As people here have already pointed out, "jordgubbe" is the commonly used word for "strawberry" in Swedish.

This is a "smultron": https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Fragaria... (wild strawberry) and this is a "jordgubbe": https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Fragola_... (strawberry)

In the end one of his theories may be right, but one would think he would mention that "jordgubbe", also means "earth berry", I'm actually quite frustrated that he's not concerned about creating a myth around what the word "smultron" means, isn't his job to bring clarity and not confusion?

One can only hope that not many other academics read this and spin things off of such a poor foundation, and instead opt to figure things out on their own, which is bound to be more reliable than basing anything off of this. It's actually quite embarrassing how many times a 5-year old's comprehension of Swedish could clear things up in the case of professors playing fast and loose with translations of Swedish or Old Norse. It would be way better if they asked a Swede before publishing things, in the case of Swedish translations, and perhaps reaching out to an Icelander when they're trying to translate Old Norse. Although it might not sound like it, this is actually the charitable critique, if he is actually fluent in Swedish, I wouldn't know where to begin.

It might also be worth pointing out that in the case of the Bergman title, "Smultronstället" refers to something very specific, and is a common idiom, namely, a place that only you and your family/close friends know about and cherish. Of course, the etymology of this term is trivial to figure out, but I don't know why this trivia was even mentioned in the post to begin with, so perhaps not?

Sorry for ranting, I just hate it when a few minutes/seconds of extra research could have cleared up some confusion for a lot of people.

I always though it was a reference for covering the ground around strawberry plants with dry straws. Strawberries especially go bad if the berries touch moist ground, gathering mold or fungus, and you'll also want to avoid weeds, so a thick layer of dried straws work perfectly for farming strawberries.

I think the real title is "The Oxford Etymologist doesn't know how strawberry got their name"

Worked on a commercial strawberry farm for a little while and we would cover the strawberry fields with straw around November to protect the plants over the winter. It would also prevent weeds during the next growing season as the parent post mentions.

I think they should be called RabbitBerries because I'll be darned if the Rabbits don't get 'em all.

Entry from etymonline: strawberry (n.) Look up strawberry at Dictionary.com Old English streawberige, streaberie; see straw + berry. There is no corresponding compound in other Germanic languages; the reason for the name is uncertain, but perhaps it is in reference to the tiny chaff-like external seeds which cover the fruit. A cognate Old English name was eorðberge "earth-berry" (compare Modern German Erdbeere). As a color adjective from 1670s. Strawberry blonde is attested from 1884. Strawberry mark (1847) so called for its resemblance.

Interesting. I'd like to see an article on why English speakers decided we needed [our own name](http://i.imgur.com/rdGWiBY.jpg ) for pineapples (the etymology seems pretty clear).

In spanish and catalan it's called `piña` and `pinya` (exact same pronunciation as ñ is ny in catalan) because its shape is similar to the `Conifer cone` (called pinya as well) [1].

[1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi%C3%B1a

Anatoly Liberman's columns are always interesting. Here is a great profile of the man:

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/origin-unknown

I thought people who cultivate Strawberries put straw underneath them to prevent wet rot or grubs from getting them?

I think the funniest think about the name "strawberry" is that they're not actually berries.

This comes from a confusion of definitions.

In common language, a berry is something small that you can pick, usually to eat. That biologists studying plants operate with another definition is really a separate concern.

It's similar with vegetables and fruit, e.g. a tomato. I imagine most people will group a tomato with vegetables, rather than apples and oranges.

One definition makes sense in a food setting, another definition makes sense when you're trying to understand how stuff works.

Strawberries like to grow near straw.

If you had discovered these and were tasked with naming them, what would you call them?

heartberries :)

That's adorable.

redberries.

seedjackets, due to them being the only fruit that has its seeds on the outside.

While we are at it, can someone tell me why french beard is called so and how it originated?

I don't know the etymology, but I do know that french bread can contain only flour, water, yeast and salt. Any other ingredients and it is not french bread.

(assuming you actually meant "French bread")

In my experience, "French bread" refers to a baguette-shaped whole loaf, which is pretty much the default for bread in France. Traditional British and American loaves have a much different shape (wider and thicker, rather than elongated).

I would speculate that the term "French bread" was created by the British to distinguish it from the loaf shape they were used to at home.

If you really did mean "French beard", I don't have a clue. :-)

May be one of the least important amongst the list of things nobody knows!

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