A cherry is a small, round fruit with a pit in the middle and smooth red or dark skin. As an adjective, it can describe something that is cherry-red in color or in perfect, unused condition.
“Cherry” comes from Old Northern French “cherise,” from Latin “cerasum,” the name of a region in ancient Turkey known for the fruit. English speakers mistakenly treated the old word as a plural and formed a new singular “cherry.”
Cherry is a classic example of a “back-formation”: people heard “cherise” and thought it meant “cherries,” so they invented “cherry” as the singular. That mistake literally reshaped the word. Every time you eat a cherry, you’re biting into a tiny fossil of a misunderstanding.
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