Although cherries and rhinoceroses differ in several respects, they may in fact derive their names from the same source. What links the two names is the Greek keras, meaning horn. For the animal, the ancient Greeks compounded keras—or rather its adjective form keros—with a form of rhis, meaning nose, to form rhinokeros, which entered English as rhinoceros, the name of the hornnosed animal. Similarly, for the fruit, the ancient Greeks may have taken keras and turned it into kerasos, which they applied to the cherry tree, the connection being that the bark of a cherry tree is as smooth as horn. It is also possible, however, that the Greek word for cherry tree, kerasos, did not derive from keras, but rather from Cerasus, the name of a region near the Black Sea where cherry trees flourished. Whatever the origin of kerasos, the ancient Romans eventually borrowed the Greek word to create their own word for the cherry, cerasus. This Latin word then evolved into various ancient European languages. In Germanic, for example, it became kirissa, which developed into the Old English word for the cherry, ciris (the Germanic kirissa also became the Modern German kirsch, the name of cherry-flavoured brandy). In French, the Latin cerasus evolved into cherise, a form introduced into English in the fourteenth century, one that eventually drove the original Old English form of the word, ciris, into extinction.
The fruit of the Prunus cerasus tree, which includes various cultivated varieties, can be found in many countries around the world.