alt Hacker NewsA tomato is definitely a vegetable.
Botanically, there are no such things as vegetables. The classification of a thing as a "vegetable" is strictly a culinary distinction. Cucumbers, tomatoes, apples, oranges, they're all the fruit of the plant, but the first two are culinarily classified as vegetables and the last two as fruits.
Also, salad is a preparation method, specifically the chopping of ingredients and the application of a sauce to make a semi homogeneous dish. It is not strictly a dish of chopped vegetables, so putting apples "in a salad" doesn't mean the apple is being used as a vegetable. You can put meat in a salad and it doesn't make the meat a vegetable. Tuna salad can be made with no vegetables at all.
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Apples are not fruit in the strict botanical sense.
> Apples are considered "accessory fruits" (or sometimes termed "false fruits") rather than true botanical fruits because the fleshy, edible part develops primarily from the flower's hypanthium or receptacle, not just the ovary. The actual, true fruit is the core containing the seeds, making it a pome.
In modern English, most people use "vegetable" with its current culinary meaning.
In earlier centuries, "vegetable" still had mostly its original meaning taken from Latin, where "Vegetabilia", as used e.g. by Linnaeus for the "vegetabile regnum", referred to any living beings capable of growth, but incapable of motion, i.e. mainly to the terrestrial plants.
Strictly speaking, seeds, grains, nuts, fruits, roots, bulbs, leaves, stems, etc. are all parts of vegetables.
What in English is now called "vegetables" corresponds to the Latin word "holera", whose original meaning was "greens", and not at all with the Latin word "vegetabilia". Also English "fruits" does not correspond with Latin "fructa", but with Latin "poma". Latin "fructa" referred to the useful results of some activity, a sense still encountered more rarely in English.