Skip to content
Allin

cabbage

nounverbnounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈkabɪd͡ʒ//
  • Canada//ˈkæbɪd͡ʒ//
  • Australia//ˈkæbəd͡ʒ//
  • New Zealand//ˈkɛbəd͡ʒ//

An edible plant (Brassica oleracea var. capitata) having a head of green leaves.

noun

  1. 1

    An edible plant (Brassica oleracea var. capitata) having a head of green leaves.

    In aphrodisiac preparation, wild cabbage was frequently an ingredient.

  2. 2

    An edible plant (Brassica oleracea var. capitata) having a head of green leaves. Any of various cultivars of the species Brassica oleracea.

  3. 3

    The leaves of this plant eaten as a vegetable.

    Cabbage is good for you.

  4. 4

    A person with severely reduced mental capacities due to brain damage.

    After the car crash, he became a cabbage.

  5. 5

    Used as a term of endearment.

    If you deceive me, Yasha, I don't know if my nerves could stand it. YASHA (kissing her) My little cabbage! Of course, a girl must know her place.

  6. 6

    slangMoney.

  7. 7

    slangMarijuana leaf, the part that is not smoked but from which cannabutter can be extracted.

  8. 8

    A terminal bud of certain palm trees, used for food.

  9. 9

    A cabbage palmetto (Sabal palmetto), a palm of the southeastern US coasts and nearby islands.

  10. 10

    slangA human head.

    American made choppas / You beefin', we split ya cabbage

  11. 11

    slangSynonym of spinach (“thick rough”).

    That shot left me in the cabbage!

Etymology

Etymology tree Old French caboce Anglo-Norman cabochebor. Middle English caboche English cabbage From Middle English caboche, cabage (“cabbage”; “a certain fish”), a borrowing from Anglo-Norman caboche (“head”), a northern variant of caboce, of uncertain origin. Some authorities derive it from Latin caput (“head”), others from ca- (said to be an expressive prefix) + boce (“hump; bump”) (whence English boss).

verb

  1. 1

    To form a head like that of the cabbage.

    to make lettuce cabbage

  2. 2

    slangTo do nothing; to idle; veg out.

    How effective the project was is a moot point, because there were never any studies carried out to see whether children benefited from cabbaging in front of the TV rather than interacting with a teacher.

  3. 3

    slangTo be killed or murdered, such as by being shot in the head.

noun

  1. 1

    slangScraps of cloth which are left after a garment has been cut out, which tailors traditionally kept.

Etymology

Unclear. Perhaps from Dutch *kabbassen, from Old French cabasser (“put into a basket”), from cabas. Alternatively, perhaps from an earlier word *carbage (“shred”), a potential variant of *garbage (“wheat straw”).

verb

  1. 1

    To embezzle or purloin; to pilfer, to steal.

    [Y]our Butler purloins your Liquor, and your Brevver ſells your Hogvvaſh; […] your Taylor, inſtead of Shreds, cabages vvhole Yards of Cloth; […]

    We toted in the wood and got the fire going nice and comfortable. Lord James still set in one of the chairs and Applegate had cabbaged the other and was hugging the stove.

Forms

plural
cabbages
past tense
cabbaged
past participle
cabbaged
present participle
cabbaging
third person singular
cabbages
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).