mossberry

plural mossberries

1. Empetrum nigrum, a species of crowberry.

   She saw a patch of mossberries, the shiny black berries nearly hidden in a tangle of heather, and stopped to pick them.

   1990, Sue Harrison, Mother Earth Father Sky (Ivory Carver Trilogy; 1), New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, →ISBN, page 13

   2 more examples

   Many kinds of wild fruit gave variety to our diet of fish and birds—red currants and gooseberries, red raspberries and black mossberries, high and low-bush cranberries, and, best of all, the northern blueberries, which grow profusely all over this part of the Yukon.

   1942 May, William Hamilton Albee, Ruth Albee, “Family Afoot in Yukon Wilds: Two Young Children and Their Parents Live Off the Country in the Northwest Canada Wilderness Now To Be Traversed by the Alaska Highway”, in The National Geographic Magazine, volume LXXXI, number 5, Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, page 613, columns 1–2

   Small black mossberries, indigenous to the Aleutian Islands, are a favorite of the Aleuts, but almost any wild berry will do, as well as garden variety currants, cooked and sweetened cranberries, and, in Alaska, any variety of tundra fruit.

   1983, the Editors and Friends of ALASKA® magazine, “The Cook’s Tour”, in Cooking Alaskan, Anchorage, Ak.: Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, →ISBN, book one (From The Waters), page 73, column 2

   Synonyms: rockberry