A cranberry is a small, very tart red berry that grows on low plants and is often made into juice or sauce.
From earlier “cranberry,” a translation of German “Kranbeere” (crane-berry), named because the plant’s blossoms were thought to look like a crane’s head and beak. Over time, the connection to the bird faded in English speakers’ minds.
Cranberry once clearly meant ‘crane-berry,’ but that story is now hidden inside the modern word. Linguists even use ‘cranberry words’ to describe word-parts that only appear in one word, like the ‘cran-’ here that doesn’t live anywhere else.
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