Yes. Under the botanical definition, a banana is a true berry and a strawberry is not — because botany classifies fruit by how it develops, not by how it tastes.
Forget size, sweetness, and whether it goes on cereal. Botanists ask one question: how did the fruit form? If the whole fleshy fruit develops from one flower carrying a single ovary, with the seeds resting inside the flesh, it's a berry. A banana fits that pattern exactly — its wild ancestors even had obvious seeds packed inside, which modern grocery bananas have mostly been bred to shrink away.
A strawberry flower carries many separate ovaries. After pollination, each tiny ovary becomes its own miniature dry fruit — an achene — and those are the pale specks dotted over the surface. The red, juicy part everyone eats isn't the fruit wall at all: it's the swollen stem tip, called the receptacle, that held all those achenes. Delicious, but botanically it's an accessory fruit, not a berry.
None of this changes how you cook with them. It's just a reminder that everyday words and scientific words often run on completely different rules.
See the 20-second version: "Bananas Are Berries, Strawberries Aren't — Things You Didn't Know" on LOE PRESSURE (TikTok and YouTube @loepressure).
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Sources: Stanford Magazine, "Bananas Are Berries?"; Encyclopaedia Britannica botany references on berry classification.