What does “vișine” mean in Romanian?

Where English says “cherries” for everything, Romanian splits the fruit in two. Vișine are sour, tart cherries — the ones you cook into jam or steep into vișinată liqueur — while cireșe are the sweet cherries you eat straight off the tree. They are different words for different fruits, not just two sizes, so a Romanian market-seller pricing vișine is offering something English speakers would never separate out.

The split runs all the way back to their roots: vișină was borrowed from Bulgarian višnja (Proto-Slavic višьňa), while cireașă is inherited from Latin ceresia — two languages for two cherries. The singulars are o vișină / o cireașă, and the trees are vișin and cireș. In the clip the seller hawks her “vișin veritabil, nestropit” (“a genuine, unsprayed sour-cherry tree”), boasting it’s worth a fortune, while the neighbour brags about her own “4 vii și 3 cireși” (vines and sweet-cherry trees) — the two words sitting side by side. The classic payoff for vișine is vișinată, the homemade sour-cherry liqueur made by layering the fruit with sugar and topping it with alcohol.