vegetable
English
Alternative forms
Etymology
From Middle English vegetable, from Old French vegetable, from Latin vegetābilis (“able to live and grow”), derived from vegetāre (“to enliven”). Displaced native Old English wyrt and ofett.
Related to vigil, vigour, vajra, and waker.
Pronunciation
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Noun
vegetable (plural vegetables)
- Any plant.
- 1837, The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, volume 23, page 222:
- That he might ascertain whether any of the cloths of ancient Egypt were made of hemp, M. Dutrochet has examined with the microscope the weavable filaments of this last vegetable.
- 1881–1882, Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, London; Paris: Cassell & Company, published 14 November 1883, →OCLC:
- The first of the tall trees was reached, and by the bearings proved the wrong one. So with the second. The third rose nearly two hundred feet into the air above a clump of underwood — a giant of a vegetable, with a red column as big as a cottage, and a wide shadow around in which a company could have manoeuvred.
- A plant raised for some edible part of it, such as the leaves, roots, fruit or flowers, but excluding any plant considered to be a fruit, grain, herb, or spice in the culinary sense.
- The edible part of such a plant.
- (figuratively, derogatory) A person whose brain (or, infrequently, body) has been damaged so that they cannot interact with the surrounding environment; a person in a persistent vegetative state.
- Synonym: cabbage
Derived terms
- aromatic vegetable
- fruit vegetable
- green vegetable bug
- hydrolyzed vegetable protein
- leaf vegetable
- multivegetable
- nonvegetable
- pod vegetable
- regrowing vegetable
- root vegetable
- sea vegetable
- textured vegetable protein
- Tianjin preserved vegetable
- vegeburger
- vegetable acid
- vegetable box
- vegetable butter
- vegetable carbon
- vegetable caterpillar
- vegetable fat
- vegetable fern
- vegetable garden
- vegetable hummingbird
- vegetable ivory
- vegetable ivory tree
- vegetable jelly
- vegetable juice
- vegetable kingdom
- vegetable lamb
- vegetable leather
- vegetable marrow
- vegetable mercury
- vegetable oil
- vegetable rennet
- vegetable sheep
- vegetable soup
- vegetable spaghetti
- vegetable sulfur
- vegetable sulphur
- vegetably
- veggie
Related terms
Translations
Adjective
vegetable (not comparable)
- Of or relating to plants.
- 1882, Thomas Hardy, chapter I, in Two on a Tower. A Romance. [...] In Three Volumes, volume I, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, […], →OCLC, page 1:
- On an early winter afternoon, clear but not cold, when the vegetable world was a weird multitude of skeletons through whose ribs the sun shone freely, a gleaming landau came to a pause on the crest of a hill in Wessex.
- Of or relating to vegetables.
Translations
of or relating to plants
|
of or relating to vegetables
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Further reading
vegetable on Wikipedia.Wikipedia - vegetable (disambiguation) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
Categories:
- English terms inherited from Middle English
- English terms derived from Middle English
- English terms derived from Old French
- English terms derived from Latin
- English 3-syllable words
- English 4-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio pronunciation
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- English terms with quotations
- English derogatory terms
- English adjectives
- English uncomparable adjectives
- English autohyponyms
- en:People
- en:Vegetables