Other forms: vegetables
A vegetable is a plant grown to be eaten with a meal rather than as a sweet. Eat your vegetables, fresh vegetables, a vegetable garden.
It is a culinary category and not a botanical one, which is why tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers are fruits and are shelved with the vegetables anyway. Frozen ones are often more nutritious than fresh, because they are picked ripe and frozen at once. Note that the Latin means able to live and grow.
1nounvegetableA plant grown to be eaten as part of a meal.
“Try to eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables every day.”
vegetable is a food.
Latin vegetabilis means able to live and grow, from vegetare, to enliven. Vigour and vigil come from the same liveliness.
Latin
vegetābilis
Old French
vegetable
Middle English
vegetable
English, today
vegetable
Built from
From Middle English vegetable, from Old French vegetable, from Latin vegetābilis. From Middle English vegetable, from Old French vegetable, from Latin vegetābilis (“able to live and grow”), derived from vegetāre (“to enliven”). wyrt and ofett, whence modern wort and ovest. Related to vigil, vigour, vajra, and waker.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA