cauliflower

Pluralcauliflowers

Formscauliflowers, cauliflowering, cauliflowered

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The dense white curd of the cauliflower plant, harvested and cooked as a vegetable.

   We roasted the cauliflower with olive oil until it turned golden.

   The soup gets its creamy texture from blended cauliflower.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   An annual variety of cabbage whose cluster of young flower stalks and buds is eaten as a vegetable.

   Farmers cover the heads so the cauliflower stays pale and tight.

   Cauliflower needs steady watering to form a firm head.

   Note

   The name is half Latin and half English. Sixteenth-century cole-florye joined cole, from Latin caulis, to flower, and the spelling was later reshaped to look more like its Latin source. French chou-fleur and Italian cavolfiore pair the same two ideas. Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1767) already lists cauliflowers among kitchen-garden produce, beside asparagus, artichokes and kidney beans.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The firm swelling that forms in an ear damaged by repeated blows, giving it a lumpy appearance.

   Boxers often develop cauliflower after years of blows to the head.

   Without early drainage, the bruised ear can set into permanent cauliflower.

   Note

   Fighters' shorthand lets the noun stand alone for the damaged ear. John Harding's The Whitechapel Whirlwind (2018) uses it countably, of a boxer whose ears "bore no traditional cauliflowers." Underneath the lumps is blood collected after repeated blunt blows, which separates the perichondrium from the ear's cartilage and then hardens into fibrous tissue.

4. 4
   verbtransitive or intransitive

   To swell up, or make something swell up, into a lumpy, misshapen form like that of a cauliflower ear.

   A single bad blow can cauliflower the ear if blood pools beneath the skin.

   The struck end of the old chisel had cauliflowered over from years of hammering.

   Similarmushroom, swell, deform

   Note

   Boxers' ears lent the verb its image. Elliott Chaze's The Stainless Steel Kimono (1947) describes an ear "badly cauliflowered." Metalworkers and ceramicists use it for any surface that bulges into lumpy folds, such as a hammered steel edge or a furnace brick. It works with or without an object and often takes over (the edge has cauliflowered over). Cauliflowering can also name the damage itself.

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