Fruit is the part of a flowering plant that develops from the flower and contains seeds. When you bite into an apple, peel a banana, or slice open a watermelon, you're eating fruit. The plant creates this sweet, colorful package around its seeds as a clever strategy: animals eat the fruit, travel somewhere else, and eventually deposit the seeds (often in their droppings), helping new plants grow far from the parent plant.

In everyday conversation, people usually mean sweet or tart plant foods when they say fruit: oranges, strawberries, grapes, and peaches. But scientifically, many foods we call vegetables are actually fruits because they contain seeds. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and even pumpkins are technically fruits, though cooks treat them as vegetables in the kitchen.

As an adjective, fruit can describe something related to fruit, like fruit trees or fruit juice.

People also use fruit to describe the results or rewards of effort. When a scientist's years of research finally produce a breakthrough, you might say her work has borne fruit. If your hard practice leads to success in a competition, that victory is the fruit of your labor. The fruits of someone's work means whatever good things came from their efforts.