Veg

How to spell veg

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce veg

What does veg mean?

1. nounVegetables, especially as food on a plate; an informal shortening.
2. verbTo relax completely and do very little, often in the phrase 'veg out'.

Veg in a sentence

• noun

  The roast came with potatoes and plenty of green veg.

• verb

  After a long week he just wants to veg on the sofa all evening.

• noun

  He buys his fruit and veg from the market each Saturday.

• verb

  On rainy Sundays they like to veg in front of the television.

Where does veg come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a casual twentieth-century shortening of vegetable, which itself reaches back to the Latin vegetabilis, meaning 'able to grow or flourish'. That adjective came from the verb vegetare, 'to animate or enliven', and from vegetus, 'lively and vigorous', so the distant root idea was vitality rather than carrots and peas. English took vegetable in through Old French in the late Middle Ages, at first describing anything that grew like a plant, and only later narrowing to the edible kind. The clipped form veg became common in informal British speech, both for the food on a plate and, in the phrase 'veg out', for slumping into lazy relaxation. The single soft g at the end is the only real spelling point, since the longer word's -etable tail is simply dropped.

How the word is built

• clipped form of vegetable: veget- (from Latin vegetare: to enliven) shortened to veg