vegetable [LME] The early use was both adjectival in the sense ‘growing as a plant’, from late Latin vegetabilis ‘animating’, and as a noun from vegetabilia, the plural form. They go back to vegetare ‘to animate’. Related words include vegetative [LME]; vegetation [LME] originally ‘the power of growth’; and vegetate [E17th]. The slang use veg out meaning ‘pass the time in mindless activity’ arose in the 1970s. Vegetarian is an irregular formation of the mid 19th century; the abbreviation veggie dates from the 1970s. For some reason the ending –arian of vegetarian has been reinterpreted as –tarian, hence words such as pescatarian [1990s] which appears to have been formed from the Italian pesce ‘fish’ (from Latin piscis), although this would normally be pronounced with a ‘sh’ sound rather than the ‘sk’ of the English word, so perhaps it is a mangled form of a word such as piscatorian [M16th] ‘relating to fish or fishing’ or meant to be piscitarian, a word that has been recorded only once in 1880 in the sense ‘fishmonger’.