Vegetable Meaning
/ˈvɛd͡ʒ.tə.bəl/Definition, CEFR level A1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
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Definition
nounAny plant.
nounA 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.
Sentence Examples
Tom ate vegetable soup this morning.
The tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit.
CEFR Practice Quiz
The nutritionist said that to get vitamins, you should eat a green ____ like spinach.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
Carrots are a common ____ that is rich in vitamins and can be eaten either raw or several cooked in a meal today.
Word Origin & History
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.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"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."
— 1837, The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, volume 23, page 222:
"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."
— 1881–1882, Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, London; Paris: Cassell & Company, published 14 November 1883, →OCLC:
"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."
— 1882, Thomas Hardy, chapter I, in Two on a Tower. A Romance. [...] In Three Volumes, volume I, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, […], →OCLC, page 1:
Explore More A1 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
The nutritionist said that to get vitamins, you should eat a green ____ like spinach.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
Carrots are a common ____ that is rich in vitamins and can be eaten either raw or several cooked in a meal today.