Cucumbers taste earthy instead of sweet like your favorite fruits, so it makes sense to categorize them as vegetables — but this may not be accurate.

Fruits grow from a plant's flower, and all fruits have seeds. By contrast, vegetables grow from other parts of

the plant like the leaves or

roots and don't have seeds.

If you cut a cucumber open, you'll see row upon row of telltale seeds, meaning that cucumbers are actually fruits.

Since cucumbers are used in soups, stews, and of course, salads in which vegetables dominate, many people mistake them for vegetables despite their seeds.

Pickles, which are simply pickled cucumbers, are often found in sandwiches and burgers alongside vegetables, but they are also classified as a fruit — albeit a pickled one.

Pickles still contain the seeds that cucumbers have, and though you won't find a "pickle flower" out in the wild, they still originate from the flower of the cucumber plant.