Kale
nounA hardy green vegetable with tough, curly or flat leaves, eaten cooked or raw.
How to spell kale
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce kale
What does kale mean?
- nounA hardy green vegetable with tough, curly or flat leaves, eaten cooked or raw.
Kale in a sentence
-
She added a handful of chopped kale to the soup.
-
The market stall sold bunches of curly kale at the weekend.
Where does kale come from?
Language of origin: Latin
Kale is the northern English and Scots form of the word that appears further south as 'cole', as in coleslaw. Its ultimate source is the Latin caulis, which meant the stalk or stem of a plant and came to stand for the cabbage family as a whole. Old English borrowed this Latin word as cawel or cal, naming the same hardy leafy vegetable. The distinctive spelling with a 'k' was reinforced by Scandinavian settlers, whose Old Norse word kal carried the same meaning, which is why the form survived strongly in Scotland and the north. The plain four-letter spelling is phonetically honest, so the main thing to remember is the single 'a' and the 'k' rather than the softer 'c' of its 'cole' cousin.
How the word is built
- kale (from Latin caulis: cabbage stem), a single root with no affixes
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.