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Since people say someone tanned is 'as brown as a berry' which berries are brown?
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'Brown as a Berry'

The phrase seems to have originated in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales", The Cooks Tale, line 44:

There lived a 'prentice, once, in our city,
And of the craft of victuallers was he;
Happy he was as goldfinch in the glade,
Brown as a berry, short, and thickly made,
With black hair that he combed right prettily.

Now I didn't find anyone who claimed to know what berry Chaucer had in mind. I'm going to make a guess that he was using some obsolete meaning for berry to speak of grain. Whole, unground grains are sometimes referred to as berries, such as wheatberry.

The dictionary.net definition of "berry" is a coffee bean, so "brown as a berry" could mean "brown as a coffee bean."

However, if indeed Chaucer is the origin of the phrase, toasted wheatgrains are more likely than coffee beans, since Europeans in Chaucer's time did not have coffee beans.

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First answer by ID3486020742. Last edit by Englishangel. Contributor trust: 1608 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 38 [recommend question]

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