Cabbage
nounA leafy green or purple vegetable that grows as a dense, rounded head of overlapping leaves.
How to spell cabbage
7 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce cabbage
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does cabbage mean?
- nounA leafy green or purple vegetable that grows as a dense, rounded head of overlapping leaves.
Cabbage in a sentence
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She shredded a whole cabbage to make coleslaw for the barbecue.
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The soup needed one more cabbage and a few carrots.
Where does cabbage come from?
Language of origin: French
Cabbage comes from the Old Northern French word caboche, a regional term meaning 'head', which was itself a playful, swollen form of the Latin caput, literally 'head'. The name made obvious sense because a cabbage grows as a tight, rounded ball of leaves that genuinely resembles a head. English picked the word up in the 1300s, and over time the spelling settled with the double 'b' and the soft 'ge' ending that disguise its French roots. The same caput ancestor lies behind a surprising family of English words, including 'captain', 'capital' and even 'chapter', so the humble vegetable shares a bloodline with some far grander terms. In British slang, 'cabbage' also came to mean loose money or scraps of cloth, an extra sense that grew far from the garden patch.
How the word is built
- cabb- (head, from Old French caboche)
- -age (noun suffix)
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