huckleberry

plural huckleberries

1. A small round fruit of a dark blue or red color, of several plants in the related genera Vaccinium and Gaylussacia.

   1 more example

   I stumbled along through the young pines and huckleberry bushes. Pretty soon I struck into a sort of path that, I cal'lated, might lead to the road I was hunting for. It twisted and turned, and, the first thing I knew, made a sudden bend around a bunch of bayberry scrub and opened out into a big clear space like a lawn.

   1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter I, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC

2. A shrub growing this fruit.
3. A small amount, a short distance, as in the phrase huckleberry above a persimmon.

   Porter preferred prose to poetry. Prose seemed to him to be a concrete, practical form of expression. But poetry, as he informed a poet who signed his name “Evergreen,” was “a huckleberry beyond us.”

   1967, Richard Boyd Hauck, The Literary Content of the New York Spirit of the Times, 1831-1856, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, page 88

4. slangA person of little consequence.

   1999, Paul Lieberstein, "De-Kahnstructing Henry" (King of the Hill TV episode You got such a bug in your bonnet about phones? Check this out. I call France on this phone whenever I want. France, Europe, huckleberry.

5. USslangThe person one is looking for; the right person for the job.

   I'm your huckleberry.

present singular third person huckleberries · participle present huckleberrying · participle past huckleberried · past huckleberried

1. intransitiveTo pick huckleberries.