1
Abiu
Pouteria caimito
A bright yellow Amazonian fruit with translucent jelly-like flesh and a flavor reminiscent of crème caramel — sticky white latex and all.
Looking for 4-letter fruits? Here are 13 fruits that fit — each linked to a full profile.
Letters are counted across the whole name with spaces, hyphens, apostrophes, and diacritics excluded. "Apple Pie" is 8 letters; "Boeuf Bourguignon" is 16.
List of 4-letter Fruits
2
Acai
Euterpe oleracea
A small dark purple Amazonian palm berry that briefly conquered Western health foods in the 2000s — the actual fruit is mostly pit, with a thin, oily, antioxidant-rich pulp.
3
Amla
Phyllanthus emblica
The Indian gooseberry — a small, translucent greenish-yellow fruit of extreme sourness and bitterness, one of the richest natural sources of vitamin C; sacred in Hindu tradition and the foundation of Ayurvedic medicine for 5,000 years.
4
Bael
Aegle marmelos
A sacred Indian fruit tree — the bael (Bengal quince or stone apple) is one of the most revered plants in Hinduism, its trifoliate leaves used in Shiva worship; the fruit is a hard-shelled sphere the size of a large orange, with dry, orange, aromatic flesh inside that is eaten fresh or made into a beloved Indian drink; dried bael slices are a staple of traditional Ayurvedic medicine.
5
Date
Phoenix dactylifera
The sweet sticky fruit of the date palm, dried and energy-dense, a staple of Middle Eastern and North African cuisine for thousands of years.
6
Imbe
Garcinia livingstonei
A small bright orange African fruit related to the mangosteen, with a thin skin enclosing tart-sweet juicy flesh — eaten fresh or fermented into a drink.
7
Lime
Citrus aurantiifolia (Key); Citrus latifolia (Persian); others
A small, intensely acidic green citrus — the namesake of "limey" sailors, the soul of margaritas and ceviche, with the Persian and Key versions producing distinct flavors despite similar appearance.
8
Lulo
Solanum quitoense
A bright orange Andean fruit (also called naranjilla) that looks like a small tomato but tastes like a tart pineapple-citrus-rhubarb mash — a Colombian and Ecuadorian breakfast-juice essential.
9
Noni
Morinda citrifolia
A striking, waxy, pungent tropical fruit — the noni (Indian mulberry) produces lumpy, white-yellow fruit year-round on small trees throughout the Pacific and Indian Ocean tropics; the ripe fruit has a powerful, distinctively unpleasant smell that has earned it nicknames including cheese fruit and vomit fruit; despite this, it has been consumed by Pacific Islander peoples for millennia and became a major health food fad in the early 2000s.
10
Pear
Pyrus communis (European); Pyrus pyrifolia (Asian)
A pome fruit of the rose family — closely related to apples but with grittier flesh and a teardrop shape, with thousands of varieties and a unique post-harvest ripening behavior.
11
Plum
Prunus domestica (European); Prunus salicina (Japanese)
A small to medium-sized stone fruit of the rose family, with hundreds of varieties from the deep purple Damson of Britain to the golden Mirabelle of Lorraine — eaten fresh, dried into prunes, or made into liqueurs and sauces.
12
Sloe
Prunus spinosa
The fruit of the blackthorn — a small, purple-black berry so astringent when eaten raw that it causes involuntary puckering; almost exclusively used to make sloe gin by macerating the frost-damaged berries in gin with sugar for months.
13
Yuzu
Citrus junos
A small bumpy yellow Japanese citrus that's all aroma and almost no juice — used for zest and a few drops of intensely fragrant juice, central to Japanese cuisine and increasingly to Western cocktails.
About 4-letter fruits
That's our current list of fruits with exactly 4 letters. Need a different length? Try the browse-by-length pills in the sidebar, or combine with a starting letter — for example, 4-letter fruits that start with A.