Peases

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The plural form of a leguminous plant that produces edible seeds commonly known as field peas or garden peas, often used for food or agriculture; a term referring to multiple units of these seeds; and a word indicating various types of peas cultivated for human consumption or animal feed
2. Refers to several mature seeds harvested from pea plants, typically used as vegetables or in cooking; indicates a quantity of these legume seeds; describes the collective form of the pea crop or pods containing these edible seeds
3. Denotes multiple individual seeds from plants of the Pisum genus eaten as vegetables; relates to many specimens of this crop harvested or cultivated; applies to different varieties of peas grouped as a countable noun for agricultural or culinary purposes

Etymology: The word "peases" is a plain inflected form, so the story belongs to "pease", which is the older name for the pea itself. Its ancestry runs back to Ancient Greek "píson", a variant of "písos", which Latin borrowed as "pisum" and which passed into Late Latin as "pisa". Old English took the word as "pise", and Middle English softened it into "pese", a form that later hardened into the modern "pea" while "pease" lingered on as a collective word for the crop. Here "peases" is the third-person singular form of "pease", so it shares that word's origin in the Greek and Latin names for the pulse. The "pease" spelling survived in English as a mass or collective noun, which is why people once spoke of a field of pease as a single crop rather than of individual peas.

Synonyms: peas, legumes, pulses