Ok now breathe. That was a lot of information wasn’t it? Well brace yourself because there are even more fruit varieties. We didn’t even cover capsules, siliques, scizocarps, follicles, or utricles. Don't worry though, we're not going to inundate you with more fruit types. By now you're probably wondering why the common definition of fruit and the botanical definition are so far off. As it turns out..

Language and law ruin everything.

In Old English there were two words for fruit. There’s “Apple” which indicated literally every sort of fruit or nut and “berry” which indicated any small, squishy fruit. Confusingly, Old English also had the word hnutu which meant “hard seed” and would eventually become the word “nut” by way of the Danish. The word “fruit” itself comes from the Latin fructus which was a word for any useful agricultural product or “delight and enjoyment” which later became the English word for vegetables, grains, nuts and acorns or “income from agricultural produce” (but only after it became the Old French world fruit, for “fruits eaten as desert or harvest”). Vegetable derives from a Latin term for “growing/flourishing” and only became the term for “green growing, non-animals” in the 15th century, displacing the Old English “wort”. Making matters worse, the word “vegetable” has no botanical meaning, further confusing the issue between scientists and the lay public.

In other words, the reason that the common names of fruits are inaccurate is because the English language had only two native terms for fruit that were interrelated with similar words in neighboring languages. Over time, semantic drift made some of these words interchangeable, some of them distinct while at the same time new words were added to the lexicon.

It gets even weirder when you layer legislation and culinary definitions on top of the semantic confusion. In Nix v. Hedden the Supreme Court heard oral arguments between tomato importers and the customs officials of the Port of New York. The customs office argued that tomatoes counted as vegetables for the purpose of taxation because people often referred to them as vegetables. The Supreme Court unanimously agreed, establishing a legal precedent favoring the common meaning of words when interpreting laws. In other words the Supreme Court found that tomatoes are fruits that can be legislated as vegetables because most people call them vegetables, unless the law applies to, say, botanists who distinguish between botanical fruits and everything else.

So now you know why things are confusing and are armed with enough information to distinguish between different types of fruit, as a botanist would. You can impress your friends, annoy your teachers, and confuse your family members. The one thing you shouldn't do is get into fruit-oriented arguments with people. Nobody likes it when they're angrily lectured about the finer points of fruit anatomy and classification. It's even worse when you're a botanist, because there are some fruits, like avocados, that defy classification. Is it a berry? Is it a drupe? The only thing we're sure of is that the avocado is the fatty, Helen of Troy of the fruit world. Who knew fruits were so complicated?