In botany, the berry is the most common type of simple fleshy fruit; a fruit in which the entire ovary wall ripens into an edible pericarp. The flowers of these plants have a superior ovary and they have one or more carpels within a thin covering and very fleshy interiors. The seeds are embedded in the common flesh of the ovary.

In this sense, the tomato is a berry and the strawberry is not; rather, every strawberry on a strawberry plant makes 1 berry as a whole. Other examples of botanical berries include the grape, lychee, cumquat, plantain,avocado, persimmon, eggplant, guava, uchuva (ground cherry) and chile pepper. The fruit of citrus, such as the orange and lemon, is a modified berry called a hesperidium. The fruit of cucumbers and their relatives are modified berries called "pepoes." A plant that bears berries is referred to as bacciferous.

In common parlance and cuisine, the term "berry" refers generically to any small, sweet fruit; in this sense, the strawberry is a berry and the tomato is not. Other berries in this, but not the botanical, sense include aggregate fruits such as the blackberry, the raspberry, and the boysenberry.

These fruits tend to be small, sweet, juicy, and of a bright color contrasting with their background to make them more attractive to animals that disperse them and thus scatter widely the seeds of the plant.