cabbage
Pluralcabbages (some meanings)
Verbcabbages, cabbaging, cabbaged
Pluralcabbages (some meanings)
Formscabbages, cabbaging, cabbaged
- 1The leaves of the cabbage plant, eaten cooked or raw as a vegetable.
The recipe calls for finely shredded cabbage and a splash of vinegar.
He simmered cabbage and sausage together for an hour.
Note
On the plate, cabbage is a mass noun. You eat cabbage, or some cabbage, the way you eat spinach, and "Cabbage is good for you" takes a singular verb. To count it, cooks fall back on the whole plant, as in a cabbage or two heads of cabbage. That counted use belongs to the growing plant rather than to the vegetable as food.
- 2An edible plant of the species Brassica oleracea that forms a dense head of green leaves, grown widely as a vegetable.
This variety of cabbage forms a tight, pale-green head by late summer.
Gardeners often grow cabbage alongside other brassicas like broccoli and kale.
Note
The name describes the plant's most obvious feature: Middle English caboche came from Anglo-Norman caboche, "head". Its deeper origin is disputed. Some trace it to Latin caput, others to ca- plus boce, "hump", the word that also gave English boss. The noun counts both ways: you buy a cabbage, meaning one whole head, but you eat some cabbage as food.
- 3Any of various cultivated varieties of the species Brassica oleracea, including forms such as kale, broccoli, and cauliflower.
Kale, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts are all cultivated forms of cabbage.
Each type of cabbage was bred from the same wild plant for a different edible part.
- 4Money, especially in the form of cash.
She made a lot of cabbage flipping houses last year.
I'm a little short on cabbage until payday.
Similarmoney, cash, dough, bread, moolah
Note
A slang word that is uncountable, like money itself. You make a lot of cabbage or run short on cabbage, but you never earn cabbages. It belongs to casual talk. In anything formal, plain money is the safer choice, and where food or gardens are in view, listeners will hear the vegetable first.
- 5Someone left with gravely diminished mental function as a result of brain damage.
The family feared that years in the institution had reduced him to a cabbage.
He was terrified the stroke would leave him a cabbage in a hospital bed.
Similarvegetable
Note
An insult that reduces a person to a vegetable. It is offensive both to people living with brain injury and to those who care for them. It usually follows verbs of change, as in become a cabbage or leave someone a cabbage. When writing about such injuries, describe the condition plainly and leave this word to quoted speech.
- 6An affectionate name used for a person one loves or feels fondness for.
He greeted his daughter with a warm, 'There's my cabbage!'
Don't cry, cabbage, everything will be all right.
Similardarling, sweetheart, honey, pet, love
Note
An endearment that likes company, especially a possessive and a diminutive. "My little cabbage!" says Yasha, kissing her, in Tom Stoppard and Helen Rappaport's 2009 English version of The Cherry Orchard. It is used in direct address, and its homely image keeps it affectionate and faintly comic. That makes it suited to teasing tenderness rather than solemn declarations.
- 7The human head.
The boxer caught a jab right on the cabbage.
He rubbed his cabbage where the ball had struck him.
Similarhead, noggin, nut, noodle, bonce
Note
Slang from African-American Vernacular English that returns the word to its roots, since the Anglo-Norman source meant "head". It tends to turn up in talk of violence. JPEGMAFIA's "Cult Status" (2024) uses it in a threat to break someone's head. That violent setting means it reads as tough or menacing, not as a playful word for someone's noggin.
- 8To spend time idly, doing nothing in particular.
He likes to cabbage in front of the TV after a long shift.
They spent the whole rainy afternoon cabbaging at home.
Similarlaze, lounge, idle, loaf, vegetate
Note
The same vegetable joke as veg out: a person idles as inertly as a plant. It turns up most often in the -ing form and is commonly tied to a screen. Steve Mckevitt's Why the World Is Full of Useless Things (2006) speaks of children "cabbaging in front of the TV". Keep it to casual or wry writing.
- 9To steal, embezzle, or pilfer something, especially in small quantities.
The clerk had been cabbaging office supplies for months.
Dishonest workers will cabbage small tools from the site.
Similarpilfer, steal, filch, pinch, nick
Note
The tailor's habit turned into a verb. John Arbuthnot's 1733 satire complains that "your Taylor, instead of Shreds, cabages whole Yards of Cloth". By Joseph C. Lincoln's Mr. Pratt's Patients (1913), a man has "cabbaged" a chair. That use is lighter, closer to grabbing or commandeering than to embezzling. The verb is always transitive and needs an object.
- 10Scraps of cloth left over after a garment is cut out, which tailors traditionally kept for themselves.
The shop's cabbage was bundled up and sold off at the end of the season.
By tradition, the cabbage from each order belonged to the cutter, not the customer.
Similaroffcuts, scraps, remnants, clippings
Note
A different word altogether that happens to share the vegetable's spelling. Its origin is unclear. It may come from a Dutch verb traced to Old French cabasser, "put into a basket", or from an older *carbage, "shred". The tailor's offcuts were a recognized perquisite, and keeping them gave rise to the verb for pilfering.
- 11The leaf of the marijuana plant: not the part that is smoked, but the material from which cannabutter is extracted.
Instead of throwing out the cabbage, she simmered it into cannabutter.
The leftover cabbage from the harvest went straight into the infusion pot.
Note
Here the plant is sorted by use. Cabbage is what is left once the smokable part is set aside, so people speak of it as a by-product to save and cook down rather than to smoke. Like the money slang, it is a mass noun: you have some cabbage, never a cabbage.
- 12The terminal bud at the crown of certain palm trees, eaten as a vegetable.
Locals harvest the cabbage from the palm and serve it boiled.
The sweet cabbage at the crown of the palm is considered a delicacy.
Similarheart
Note
The name travels from the garden to the palm tree: the edible bud at a palm's crown is called cabbage because it is eaten as a vegetable. The word works both ways grammatically. A single palm yields a cabbage, while a dish is simply made of cabbage. The same bud gave its name to the cabbage palmetto.
- 13A palm (Sabal palmetto) found along the coasts of the southeastern United States and nearby islands, also known as the cabbage palmetto.
The coastal hammock was thick with cabbage, their gray trunks rising above the scrub.
Settlers used the trunks of the cabbage for wharf pilings.
Similarpalmetto
Note
A clipped form of cabbage palmetto, the fuller common name of Sabal palmetto. The short form is easy to misread, because a reader meeting "thick with cabbage" may picture a vegetable patch rather than coastal palms. Where the setting does not make the meaning clear, the full name or the botanical one avoids the confusion.
- 14To develop a dense, rounded head of leaves, in the manner of a cabbage.
In cool weather the young plants cabbage quickly into firm green heads.
The crop failed to cabbage properly after the unexpected heat wave.
Similarhead
Note
A gardener's verb whose subject is the plant itself. Lettuce or young brassicas cabbage when their leaves close into a firm head. It is intransitive, so to say what a grower or the weather does, English adds make: to make lettuce cabbage. The verb is not limited to cabbages; any crop that heads up can cabbage.
- 15To die by violence, as from a gunshot to the head.
Anybody could cabbage on these streets after dark.
Three of his crew cabbaged that year.
Similardie
Oppositesurvive
Note
An active verb with a passive meaning. The subject is the victim, so "three of his crew cabbaged" means they were killed, not that they killed anyone. The verb comes out of African-American Vernacular slang and builds on the slang word for a head, which explains its link to shots to the head.
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Origins
From Middle English caboche or cabage, borrowed from Anglo-Norman caboche ("head"), a northern variant of caboce of uncertain origin. Some authorities trace it to Latin caput ("head"), while others explain it as an expressive prefix ca- plus boce ("hump, bump"), which also gave English boss.
The origin is unclear. It may perhaps come from a Dutch word *kabbassen, from Old French cabasser ("put into a basket"), from cabas. Alternatively, it might derive from an earlier *carbage ("shred"), possibly a variant of *garbage ("wheat straw").