Gooseberry (/ˈɡuːsbɛri/ GOOSS-berr-ee or /ˈɡuːzbɛri/ GOOZ-berr-ee (American and northern British) or /ˈɡʊzbəri/ GUUZ-bər-ee (southern British)) is a common name for many species of Ribes (which also includes currants), as well as a large number of plants of similar appearance, and also several unrelated plants (see List of gooseberries). The berries of those in the genus Ribes (sometimes placed in the genus Grossularia) are edible and may be green, orange, red, purple, yellow, white, or black.

The goose in gooseberry has been mistakenly seen as a corruption of either the Dutch word kruisbes or the allied German Krausbeere, or of the earlier forms of the French groseille. Alternatively, the word has been connected to the Middle High German krus ('curl, crisped'), in Latin as grossularia.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary takes the more literal derivation from goose and berry as probable because "the grounds on which plants and fruits have received names associating them with animals are so often inexplicable that the inappropriateness in the meaning does not necessarily give good grounds for believing that the word is an etymological corruption". The French for gooseberry is groseille à maquereau, translated as 'mackerel berries', due to their use in a sauce for mackerel in old French cuisine. The word first appears in written English in the 16th century. In Britain, gooseberries may informally be called goosegogs.

Gooseberry bush was 19th-century slang for pubic hair, and from this comes the saying that babies are "born under a gooseberry bush".

Black bears, various birds and small mammals eat the berries, while game animals, coyotes, foxes and raccoons browse the foliage.

Gooseberry growing was popular in 19th-century Britain. The 1879 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica described gooseberries thus:

The gooseberry is indigenous to many parts of Europe and western Asia, growing naturally in alpine thickets and rocky woods in the lower country, from France eastward, well into the Himalayas and peninsular India.

In Britain, it is often found in copses and hedgerows and about old ruins, but the gooseberry has been cultivated for so long that it is difficult to distinguish wild bushes from feral ones, or to determine where the gooseberry fits into the native flora of the island. Common as it is now on some of the lower slopes of the Alps of Piedmont and Savoy, it is uncertain whether the Romans were acquainted with the gooseberry, though it may possibly be alluded to in a vague passage of Pliny the Elder's Natural History; the hot summers of Italy, in ancient times as at present, would be unfavourable to its cultivation. Although gooseberries are now abundant in Germany and France, it does not appear to have been much grown there in the Middle Ages, though the wild fruit was held in some esteem medicinally for the cooling properties of its acid juice in fevers; while the old English name, Fea-berry, still surviving in some provincial dialects, indicates that it was similarly valued in Britain, where it was planted in gardens at a comparatively early period.