salad

plural salads · alternative sallet

1. countableuncountableA food consisting principally of raw vegetables (especially greens, e.g. lettuce), other savoury ingredients (typically cooked), fruit, or confectionary; often involving two or more such ingredients mixed together, with larger items cut or torn into small pieces, and usually with a dressing or binding; usually served cold or at room temperature, as a dish or savoury sandwich filling.

   We'd like a couple of cheese salads and two Pepsis, please.

   2 more examples

   Lafeu. ’Twas a good lady, ’twas a good lady: we may pick a thousand salads ere we light on such another herb. Clown. Indeed, sir, she was the sweet marjoram of the salad, or rather, the herb of grace.

   c. 1604–1605 (date written), William Shakespeare, “All’s Well, that Ends Well”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene v]

   At various times and in different areas salads, compounded of meats, spices, tubers have been treated as of aphrodisiac value.

   1961, Harry E. Wedeck, Dictionary of Aphrodisiacs, New York: The Citadel Press, page 213

2. countableuncountableOne or more raw vegetables of the kind used in salads; typically greens (especially lettuce).

   I prefer a bit of salad on my burger.

   2 more examples

   sandwiches comprising a meat, a cheese, a salad, and a condiment

   Buy a bag of salad at the supermarket.

3. countableidiomaticuncountableAny mixture of different things.

   word salad

   1 more example

   Rebuffed by the Arabs and then the Iranians for trying to be part of them and their societies, Pakistan is just a hotchpotch salad of people supposedly bound together by the myth of Muslim 'Ummah'.

   2021 October 16, Gurvinder Singh, “Why Pakistan will fail”, in Guruwonder