Salad

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈsæl.əd/

Definitions

1. A cold dish of mixed raw vegetables, often served with dressing as a side or main course
2. A colorful dish typically made of various raw or cooked vegetables, fruits, nuts, and often combined with dressings or proteins as a side or main meal
3. A mixture of fresh or cooked ingredients, including greens, vegetables, and proteins, usually accompanied by a dressing, enjoyed as a refreshing course

Etymology: The most surprising thing about "salad" is that its name has nothing to do with leaves or greenery. It comes from salt. Romans seasoned their vegetables with brine or salty oil-and-vinegar dressings, and the Latin "salāre", meaning to salt, gave rise to a Vulgar Latin "*salāta", a word for salted food. That term passed into Northern Italian as "salada" or "salata", and the Italian "insalata" (literally "salted in") preserves the same idea. From there it travelled into Old French as "salade", which entered Middle English as "salade" before settling into the modern form. The word's ancestry runs back to the Latin "sal", meaning salt, which is also the root of "salary" in its older sense of salt money paid to Roman soldiers, though that link is a separate branch of the same root. What gets lost in translation is the dressing itself. The word describes the seasoning, not the leaves, so a bowl of raw greens was named for the salt that made it palatable.

Synonyms: greens, mixed greens, vegetable dish, side dish