Other forms: cabbages
A cabbage is a hard ball of tightly packed green leaves. A head of cabbage, boiled cabbage, red cabbage.
The varieties include savoy, red, white and spring greens, and all of them plus broccoli, cauliflower, kale and Brussels sprouts are the same species bred into different shapes. Overboiled cabbage is a national memory in Britain and the reason a generation dislikes it. Note cabbage white, the butterfly whose caterpillars eat it; and coleslaw, from Dutch, which means cabbage salad.
1nouncabbageA hard ball of tightly packed green leaves.
“She shredded a cabbage and some carrots to make coleslaw.”
cabbage is a vegetable.
Middle English caboche comes from a northern French word for a head, from Latin caput. The vegetable is named after a head, which is also why a head of cabbage is the standard phrase.
Middle English
caboche
English, today
cabbage
Built from
From Middle English caboche. From Middle English caboche (“cabbage”; “a certain fish”), a borrowing from Anglo-Norman - caboche (“head”), a northern variant of caboce, of uncertain origin. Some authorities derive it from Latin caput (“head”), others from ca- (said to be an expressive prefix) + boce (“hump; bump”) (whence boss).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA