Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A dish of raw leafy green vegetables, often tossed with pieces of other raw or cooked vegetables, fruit, cheese, or other ingredients and served with a dressing.
  • noun The course of a meal consisting of this dish.
  • noun A cold dish of chopped vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, eggs, or other food, usually prepared with a dressing, such as mayonnaise.
  • noun A green vegetable or herb used in salad, especially lettuce.
  • noun A varied mixture.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun See sallet.
  • noun Raw herbs, such as lettuce, endive, radishes, green mustard, land- and water-cresses, celery, or young onions, cut up and variously dressed, as with eggs, salt, mustard, oil, vinegar, etc.
  • noun Herbs for use as salad: colloquially restricted in the United States to lettuce.
  • noun A dish composed of some kind of meat, chopped and mixed with uncooked herbs, and seasoned with various condiments: as, chicken salad; lobster salad.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A preparation of vegetables, as lettuce, celery, water cress, onions, etc., usually dressed with salt, vinegar, oil, and spice, and eaten for giving a relish to other food
  • noun A dish composed of chopped meat or fish, esp. chicken or lobster, mixed with lettuce or other vegetables, and seasoned with oil, vinegar, mustard, and other condiments.
  • noun (Bot.) the common burnet (Poterium Sanguisorba), sometimes eaten as a salad in Italy.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A food made primarily of a mixture of raw or cold ingredients, typically vegetables, usually served with a dressing such as vinegar or mayonnaise.
  • noun A raw vegetable of the kind used in salads.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun food mixtures either arranged on a plate or tossed and served with a moist dressing; usually consisting of or including greens

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English salade, from Old French, possibly from Old Provençal salada, from Vulgar Latin *salāta, from feminine past participle of *salāre, to salt, from Latin sāl, salt; see sal- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old French, borrowed from Northern Italian salada, salata (cf. insalata), from Vulgar Latin *salāta, from *salāre, from Latin saliō, from sal ("salt").

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Examples

Comments

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  • Before I knew about Popeye the sailor man, my mother made Popeye salad - spinach, olive oil, apples and Walla-Walla sweet-sweets (plus some vinegar, salt and pepper).

    See free association.

    April 28, 2008

  • "The manuscript also gives us our earliest recipe for salad, using the smallest leaves of parsley, sage, borage, mint, fennel, cress, rosemary, rue and purslane mixed with minced garlic, small onions and leeks, and decorated with slivered and toasted nuts and glowing pomegranate seeds. The dangerous 'coldness' of the uncooked herbs was mitigated by a 'warming' dressing of oil and vinegar, a classic combination that would remain unchanged for centuries."

    --Kate Colquhoun, Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking (NY: Bloomsbury, 2007), 57

    Note: the manuscript in question is The Forme of Cury, which dates from the reign of Richard II, reigned 1377 to 1399.

    January 8, 2017