Fruit

In botany, a fruit is a plant structure that contains the plant's seeds.

To a botanist, the word fruit is used only if it comes from the part of the flower which was an ovary.^[1] It is an extra layer round the seeds, which may or may not be fleshy. However, even in the field of botany, there is no general agreement on how fruits should be classified. Many do have extra layers from other parts of the flower.^[2]

In general speech, and especially in cooking, fruits are a sweet product, and many botanical fruits are known as vegetables. This is how ordinary people use the words. On this page, we describe what botanists call a fruit.

The fleshy part of a fruit is called the mesocarp. It is between the fruit's skin (exocarp) and the seeds. The white part of an apple, for example, is the "fleshy" part of the apple. Usually, when we eat a fruit, we eat the "fleshy" part.

1. ↑ Mauseth, James D. 2003. Botany: an introduction to plant biology. Jones & Bartlett, Boston.
2. ↑ Schlegel, Rolf 2003. Encyclopedic dictionary of plant breeding and related subjects. Haworth Press. ISBN 1-56022-950-0.