peppers

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of pepper.

   The market stall was piled high with glossy peppers in every color.

   He roasted the peppers over an open flame until their skins blistered.

   Note

   The plural belongs mainly to the vegetable. Red, green and yellow peppers are capsicum fruits, so they can be counted. The ground spice made from Piperaceae berries is a mass noun, so a cook adds more pepper, not more peppers. The plural also counts plants of that family. In cryptography it counts the random values added before hashing, where each value gets its own, unlike a shared salt.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of pepper.

   The coach peppers the new players with questions during every practice.

   She peppers her speeches with jokes to keep the audience awake.

   Note

   Every use of this form needs an object: a cook peppers the stew, a gunner peppers a wall. The figurative uses add a with-phrase naming what gets scattered, as in peppers a report with errors or peppers a lawn with seed. The kitchen sense needs no such phrase. In slang it can mean beats or thrashes someone, and in computing it shares the hashing sense of the plural noun.

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