vegetable

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun A plant cultivated for its edible parts, such as the roots of the beet, the leaves of spinach, the flower buds of broccoli, or the fruit or seeds of certain species, as beans, corn, and squash.
• noun The edible part of such a plant.
• noun A member of the vegetable kingdom, especially a green plant.
• noun Offensive Slang One who is severely impaired mentally and physically, as by brain injury or disease.
• adjective Of, relating to, or derived from plants or a plant.
• adjective Made from or with edible plants or plant parts.
• adjective Growing or reproducing like a plant.

from The Century Dictionary.

• Having life such as a plant has.
• Of or pertaining to plants; characteristic of plants; also, having the characteristics of a plant or of plants; resembling a plant or what belongs to plants; occupied or concerned with plants.
• An alkaloid.
• noun A plant. See plant.
• noun In a more limited sense, a herbaceous plant used wholly or in part for culinary purposes, or for feeding cattle, sheep, or other animals, as cabbage, cauliflower, turnips, potatoes, spinach, peas, and beans. The whole plant may be so used, or its tops or leaves, or its roots, tubers, etc., or its fruit or seed.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun (Biol.) A plant. See plant.
• noun A plant used or cultivated for food for man or domestic animals, as the cabbage, turnip, potato, bean, dandelion, etc.; also, the edible part of such a plant, as prepared for market or the table.
• noun A person who has permanently lost consciousness, due to damage to the brain, but remains alive; sometimes continued life requires support by machinery such as breathing tubes. Such a person is said to be in a vegetative state.
• adjective Of or pertaining to plants; having the nature of, or produced by, plants
• adjective Consisting of, or comprising, plants.
• adjective (Chem.) an alkaloid.
• adjective (Bot.) See Vegetable sulphur, below.
• adjective (Bot.) a name of several kinds of concrete vegetable oil; as that produced by the Indian butter tree, the African shea tree, and the Pentadesma butyracea, a tree of the order Guttiferæ, also African. Still another kind is pressed from the seeds of cocoa (Theobroma).
• adjective a textile material, manufactured in Germany from pine-needle wool, a down or fiber obtained from the leaves of the Pinus sylvestris.
• adjective See Ivory nut, under Ivory.
• adjective See Pectin.
• adjective (Nat. Hist.) See the last Phrase, below.
• adjective (Bot.) See Vegetable leather, under Leather.
• adjective (Bot.) an egg-shaped gourd, commonly eight to ten inches long. It is noted for the very tender quality of its flesh, and is a favorite culinary vegetable in England. It has been said to be of Persian origin, but is now thought to have been derived from a form of the American pumpkin.
• adjective (Bot.) the oyster plant. See under Oyster.
• adjective papyrine.
• adjective (Bot.) a white woolly plant (Raoulia eximia) of New Zealand, which grows in the form of large fleecy cushions on the mountains.
• adjective a cottonlike, fibrous material obtained from the coating of the seeds of a Brazilian tree (Chorisia speciosa). It is used for various purposes, as for stuffing cushions, and the like, but is incapable of being spun on account of a want of cohesion among the fibers.
• adjective See 1st Loof.
• adjective the fine and highly inflammable spores of the club moss (Lycopodium clavatum); witch meal.
• adjective a substance resembling tallow, obtained from various plants; as, Chinese vegetable tallow, obtained from the seeds of the tallow tree. Indian vegetable tallow is a name sometimes given to piney tallow.
• adjective a waxy excretion on the leaves or fruits of certain plants, as the bayberry.
• adjective (Nat. Hist.) that primary division of living things which includes all plants. The classes of the vegetable kingdom have been grouped differently by various botanists. The following is one of the best of the many arrangements of the principal subdivisions.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun Any plant.
• noun A 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, or spice in the culinary sense.
• noun The edible part of such a plant.
• noun figuratively A person whose brain (or, infrequently, body) has been damaged so that they cannot interact with the surrounding environment; a brain-dead person.
• adjective Of or relating to plants.
• adjective Of or relating to vegetables.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun edible seeds or roots or stems or leaves or bulbs or tubers or nonsweet fruits of any of numerous herbaceous plant
• noun any of various herbaceous plants cultivated for an edible part such as the fruit or the root of the beet or the leaf of spinach or the seeds of bean plants or the flower buds of broccoli or cauliflower