Origin
From en + moss + berry.
OED Online|pos=n|id=1092464536
Full definition of mossberry
Noun
- , a species of crowberry.
- 1942, 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, 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.
- 1983, the Editors and Friends of w, Cooking Alaskan Chapter The Cook’s Tour, 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.
- 1990, w, Mother Earth Father Sky, She saw a patch of mossberries, the shiny black berries nearly hidden in a tangle of heather, and stopped to pick them.
Further reading