vegetable vs weed

vegetable

noun
  • Any plant. 

  • A person whose brain (or, infrequently, body) has been damaged so that they cannot interact with the surrounding environment; a person in a persistent vegetative state. 

  • A plant raised for some edible part of it, such as the leaves, roots, fruit or flowers, but excluding any plant considered to be a fruit, grain, herb, or spice in the culinary sense. 

  • The edible part of such a plant. 

adj
  • Of or relating to plants. 

  • Of or relating to vegetables. 

weed

noun
  • Any plant unwanted at the place where and at the time when it is growing. 

  • Tobacco. 

  • Underbrush; low shrubs. 

  • A sudden illness or relapse, often attended with fever, which befalls those who are about to give birth, are giving birth, or have recently given birth or miscarried or aborted. 

  • Something unprofitable or troublesome; anything useless. 

  • A puny person; one who has little physical strength. 

  • Cannabis. 

  • Lymphangitis in a horse. 

  • A weak horse, which is therefore unfit to breed from. 

verb
  • To systematically remove materials from a library collection based on a set of criteria. 

  • To remove unwanted vegetation from a cultivated area. 

  • To pilfer the best items from a collection. 

How often have the words vegetable and weed occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )