Other forms: beans
A bean is a small seed you cook and eat — kidney, black, or baked. A tin of beans, baked beans, black beans.
Beans fix nitrogen through bacteria in their roots, which feeds the soil and is why they are rotated with other crops. Red kidney beans are genuinely dangerous undercooked and must be boiled hard for ten minutes. Full of beans means lively. Note coffee beans, which are seeds and not beans at all.
1nounbeanA small edible seed from a pod.
“She split open the pod and found a row of shiny green beans inside.”
bean is a seed.
Also accepted in games: beans
Old English bean is a Germanic word for the seed, from a Proto-Indo-European root.
Middle English
bene
English, today
bean
From Middle English bene. From Middle English bene, from Old English bēan, from Proto-West Germanic baunu, from Proto-Germanic baunō (“bean”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰabʰ- (“bean”). Cognate with Scots bene,bein (“bean”), frr buan, stq Boone, West Frisian bean,beanne, Dutch boon, German Bohne, lb Boun, Danish bønne, Faroese bøn,bøna, Icelandic baun, Norwegian Bokmål bønne, Norwegian Nynorsk bauna,baune,bogna,bønne, Swedish böna, Irish pónaire, gv poanrey, Scottish Gaelic pònair, Latin faba, Russian боб, Serbo-Croatian bȍb//бо̏б. a doublet of fava.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA