Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A low-growing evergreen shrub (Empetrum nigrum) native to cool regions of the Northern Hemisphere and having tiny leaves, small pinkish or purplish flowers, and black, berrylike fruits.
  • noun The fruit of this plant.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The fruit of Empetrum nigrum, so called from its black color; the plant itself, a heath-like evergreen shrub common on heaths in Scotland and the north of England, and found in the northern United States and arctic America. Also called black crowberry and heathberry.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Bot.) A heathlike plant of the genus Empetrum, and its fruit, a black, scarcely edible berry; -- also called crakeberry.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Empetrum; a small genus of dwarf evergreen shrubs that bear edible fruit.
  • noun Empetrum nigrum; a species of crowberry.
  • noun A fruit of such plant.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a low evergreen shrub with small purple flowers and black berrylike fruit

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Probably translation of German Krähenbeere : Krähe, crow + Beere, berry.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

crow +‎ berry

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Examples

Comments

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  • "'I taught him about crowberries and cloudberries. You can eat this one raw or in a salad,' she says, pointing to a photograph of brook saxifrage. 'And you can eat the roots of these two—wild celery and what the book calls Parry's wallflower.'"

    —James Campbell, The Final Frontiersman (New York and London: Atria Books, 2004), 244

    September 17, 2008

  • Presumably crows eat these?

    February 10, 2023

  • it's edible, so I think crows will eat these.

    They prefer nuts though as nuts are fatty food with lots of energy

    February 11, 2023