THE OED OFFERS A FEW ETYMOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS on the history of the name “gooseberry” but nothing definitive. One possibility is that the word is a corruption of “gorseberry.” As someone who has hiked through fields covered with gorse, I can confirm the two plants share sharp similarities. But the OED reminds us the “goose” may simply refer to the common bird: "the grounds on which plants and fruits have received names associating them with animals are so commonly inexplicable, that the want of appropriateness in the meaning affords no sufficient ground for assuming that the word is an etymological corruption." I suspect a more promising etymological path is to consider the plant’s historic European names. One old German name for the berries was Kräuselbeere, which translates “curled or crimped berries.” We encounter similar names for the fruit in Medieval Latin (grossularia), Middle Dutch (croesel), and Old French (grosele). In French, red currants are groseilles and gooseberries are called groseilles à maquereau (mackerel gooseberries) because they were traditionally prepared with mackerel. It would be a natural linguistic evolution for an English gardener to plant a “grooseberry” and then casually drop the “r.”
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