Other forms: salads
A salad is a cold mix of raw vegetables in a bowl. A green salad, side salad, salad dressing.
It need not be raw or cold or vegetable — a potato salad, a rice salad, a warm salad are all standard — which makes it one of the loosest food categories there is. Dressing is what holds it together. Note salad days, meaning youthful inexperience, which is from Shakespeare; and that the word comes from the Latin for salt, since salting was the original dressing.
1nounsaladA cold mix of vegetables, usually dressed.
“For lunch she had a salad of lettuce, tomato and cucumber.”
salad is a dish.
Vulgar Latin salata means salted, from sal, salt. Vegetables were dressed with salt and brine, and the word came through Italian and French.
Proto-Indo-European
*sḗh₂l
Middle English
salade
English, today
salad
Built from
From Middle English salade. From Middle English salade, from Old French salade, borrowed from Northern Italian salada, salata (compare insalata), from Vulgar Latin salāta, from salāre, from Latin saliō, from sal (“salt”). Vegetables were seasoned with brine or salty oil-and-vinegar dressings during Roman times.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA