Huckleberry
noun, verb, slang ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A small round fruit of a dark blue or red color, of several plants in the related genera Vaccinium and Gaylussacia.
"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."
- 2 blue-black berry similar to blueberries and bilberries of the eastern United States wordnet
- 3 A shrub growing this fruit.
- 4 any of several shrubs of the genus Gaylussacia bearing small berries resembling blueberries wordnet
- 5 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.”"
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- 6 any of various dark-fruited as distinguished from blue-fruited blueberries wordnet
- 7 A person of little consequence. slang
- 8 The person one is looking for; the right person for the job. US, slang
"I'm your huckleberry."
- 1 To pick huckleberries. intransitive
Example
More examples"One of my favorite sentences in the book "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is: "I could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway.""
Etymology
Probably an alteration of Middle English hurtilbery (“whortleberry”). American English from 1660s.
Related phrases
More for "huckleberry"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.