Vegetable

How to spell vegetable

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce vegetable

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does vegetable mean?

1. nounA plant or part of a plant grown and eaten as food, usually savoury rather than sweet.

Vegetable in a sentence

• Each vegetable has its own season.

• A vegetable stir-fry makes a quick weekday dinner.

Where does vegetable come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin vegetabilis, meaning 'able to grow or flourish', which was built on the verb vegetare, 'to enliven, animate, or quicken'. That verb in turn came from vegetus, meaning 'lively' or 'vigorous', so the original idea was simply 'a living, growing thing' rather than a food. English borrowed it through Old French around the late 1300s, when 'vegetable' first meant anything that grows like a plant, including trees. Only in the 1700s did it narrow to the familiar sense of a plant grown for the table. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the unstressed second 'e' in veg-E-table is barely pronounced, so writers often drop it, and the same dormant syllable hides inside the related words 'vegetate' and 'vegetation'.

How the word is built

• veget- (from Latin vegetare: to enliven, to grow)
• -able (suffix forming the noun/adjective)