What Types of Fruit Are There?

Fruits and berries that are commonly classified as fruit can be divided into different types of fruit. In the botanical sense, a distinction is made between pome fruit, stone fruit, soft fruit, and shell fruit. In addition, some types of fruit are assigned to the categories of tropical fruits or exotic fruits and “vegetables used like fruit”.

Pome fruit refers to the fruit of pome fruit plants. These include apple, pear and quince. Inside the so-called apple fruit there is a core with five seeds – this is the actual fruit. The flesh covered with a thin skin, which is eaten as fruit, is only a so-called false fruit in the botanical sense.

Stone fruit includes types of fruit with stone fruits that are characterized by a hard, woody core. This stone or pit is surrounded by a juicy, thick pulp. This category includes, for example, plums, cherries, peaches, and apricots.

Soft fruit is divided into three subcategories. Collective drupes are fruits in which several small drupes come together to form a collective drupe. The most well-known representatives of this type of fruit are blackberries and raspberries – by the way, a tip for everyone who prefers a low sugar content in the fruit. The category of aggregate fruits and pseudofruits such as strawberries and rose hips is also counted as soft fruit. The actual fruit, the small nutlet, sits on the curved, fleshy base of the strawberry – which incidentally also belongs to the low-sugar fruit – while in the case of the rose hip they are surrounded by the pulp from the base of the flower.

The so-called “true berries”, on the other hand, include fruits that have emerged from a single ovary, in which the pulp encloses one or more seeds. Fruit types such as black and red currants, gooseberries, grapes, and blueberries are referred to as real berries. Botanically, the banana is also a berry. Citrus fruits such as oranges, lemons, or grapefruit, on the other hand, are a special type of berry.

Nuts are known as nuts. Here the skin of a fruit lignifies and encloses a single seed. Nuts such as hazelnuts, walnuts, macadamia nuts, and chestnuts fall into this category. In the botanical sense, however, peanuts (legumes), pistachios, and coconuts (stone kernels of a stone fruit) are not included.

The tropical or exotic fruits include above all those types of fruit that grow in tropical or subtropical climate zones. Well-known representatives are pineapple, kiwi, mango, ginger, and lychees. Vegetables “used like fruit” include melon as well as rhubarb.