A compound fruit is "composed of two or more similar parts".

Grapes grow in clusters, but are not compound fruits.

When the fruit opens and the seeds are released, each capsule is associated with a small hole (40-60 of these) in the compound fruit.

A compound fruit may be:

These often coalesce, forming compound fruit bodies that may be irregularly cerebriform (brain-like) and up to 6 cm (2.5 in) across.

The term compound fruit is not used in technical botanical writing, but is sometimes used when it is not clear which of several fruit types is involved.

Flowering dogwoods; five species of trees, divisible into two subgroups (Benthamidia, with individual drupes, and Dendrobenthamia, with the drupes coalesced into a compound fruit).

The next year, Paul Shope considered the genus Polyozellus to be superfluous, pointed out that the compound fruit bodies and the wrinkled hymenium were instead consistent with the genus Craterellus.

It is, in fact, a compound fruit such as botanists call a syncarp, in which the carpels (that is, the ovaries) have grown together; thus, the great orange-like ball is not one fruit but many.

The only synapomorphy within Moraceae is presence of laticifers and milky sap in all parenchymatous tissues, but generally useful field characters include two carpels sometimes with one reduced, compound inconspicuous flowers, and compound fruits.

Diplocystis and Tremellogaster are each distinct in their morphologies: the former comprises compound fruit bodies each with 3-60 spore sacs crowded together, while the latter forms a roughly spherical sporocarp with a thick multi-layered peridium.