vegetable
/ˈvɛd͡ʒ.tə.bəl/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.94 in modern English
15
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
3
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A plant raised for some edible part of it, such as the leaves, roots, fruit or flowers, but excluding any plant considered to be a fruit, grain, herb, or spice in the culinary sense, and usually including non-plants lumped into the same culinary category, such as edible mushrooms and seaweed.
noun
A person whose brain (or, infrequently, whose body) has been damaged to the point that they cannot interact with the surrounding environment; a person in a persistent vegetative state.
Derogatory
adj
Of or relating to vegetables.
Example Sentences
- "That he might ascertain whether any of the cloths of ancient Egypt were made of hemp, M. Dutrochet has examined with the microscope the weavable filaments of this last vegetable."
- "The first of the tall trees was reached, and by the bearings proved the wrong one. So with the second. The third rose nearly two hundred feet into the air above a clump of underwood — a giant of a vegetable, with a red column as big as a cottage, and a wide shadow around in which a company could have manoeuvred."
- "It’s true that agriculture at the time was organic, food was locally produced and there were no ultraprocessed foods. But fresh fruits and vegetables were in short supply because they were difficult to ship and because growing seasons were so short."
- "This substance is vegetable, not mineral."
- "On an early winter afternoon, clear but not cold, when the vegetable world was a weird multitude of skeletons through whose ribs the sun shone freely, a gleaming landau came to a pause on the crest of a hill in Wessex."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Italic *weg-o-der.? Proto-Indo-European *weǵ- Proto-Indo-European *-yeti Proto-Indo-European *-éyeti Proto-Indo-European *woǵéyetider. Proto-Italic *wogeōder.? Latin vegeō Latin vegetus Latin vegetāre, vegetō Proto-Indo-European *-dʰlom Proto-Italic *-ðlom Proto-Italic *-ðlis Latin -bilis Latin vegetābilisbor. Old French vegetablebor. Middle English vegetable English vegetable From Middle English vegetable, from Old French vegetable, from Latin vegetābilis (“able to live and grow”), derived from vegetāre (“to enliven”). Displaced Old English wyrt and ofett, whence modern wort and ovest. Related to vigil, vigour, vajra, and waker.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: vegetable, vegetābilis
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈvɛd͡ʒ.tə.bəl/
- British English: /ˈvɛd͡ʒ.tə.bəl/