Other forms: onions
An onion is a round vegetable with many layers that makes you cry when you cut it. Chop an onion, fried onions, onion rings.
Cutting one breaks cells that release a gas which turns to acid in the eye, and chilling the onion slows the reaction — the folk remedies mostly work by that or not at all. The layers are leaf bases swollen with food. Note that the Latin unio means both a single pearl and an onion.
1nounonionA round layered vegetable used in cooking.
“She added a chopped onion to the soup for extra flavour.”
onion is a vegetable.
Old French oignon comes from Latin unio, which meant a single large pearl and an onion. Union comes from the same oneness.
Latin
ūniōnem
Old French
oignon
Middle English
onyoun
English, today
onion
Built from
From Middle English onyoun, oynoun, from Old French oignon, from Latin ūniōnem, accusative of unio#Etymology 3 (“onion”), which had also been borrowed into Old English as yne, ynnelēac (“onion”) (> Middle English hynne-leac, henne-leac). Displaced the inherited term ramsons.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA