Other forms: edibles
Edible means safe to eat. The mushroom you found under the trees, the flowers scattered over a fancy cake, the thin paper on the bottom of a macaroon — each one is either edible or it is not, and getting that wrong matters.
The word sets a low bar, so calling dinner edible is faint praise: it means you can get it down, no more. The opposite is inedible, and that is the word for burnt toast, grey steak and the plastic disc inside a packet of ham. Cooks and botanists use edible as a flat label — edible fungi, edible oil, the edible parts of the plant. Eatable means the same thing but sounds homelier and turns up far less in print. One newer use to know: in North America, edibles on its own means food made with cannabis.
1adjectiveedibleSafe or fit to eat.
“Check which of these mushrooms are edible before you cook them.”
Patternedible + noun (flowers, mushrooms, oil) · barely edible · edible or not · inedible
synonyms: eatable
2adjectivegoodGood enough to eat, without being at all nice.
“The soup was edible, but nobody asked for a second bowl.”
3nounfoodAs edibles, food made with cannabis.
“The shop sells edibles as well as dried leaf.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: eatable
incrEDIBLE → even the plate is EDIBLE
An incredible birthday cake: the plate is made of biscuit, the candles are sugar, and every last piece of it is edible.
hooks ontoincredible
Edible came straight from Latin edibilis, built on edō, 'eat', with the Proto-Indo-European root h₁ed- underneath it. English also keeps a homegrown twin: eatable is the same idea that arrived by a different road.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁ed-
Latin
edibilis
English, today
edible
From Latin edibilis, from Latin edō (“eat”). a doublet of eatable.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA