If forced to wear a vegetable on your lapel, you would probably choose cauliflower because it—more than any other legume, stem, or tuber—actually resembles a flowery corsage. Not surprisingly, therefore, the name of this vegetable means cabbage flower, having derived from the Italian cavoli, meaning cabbage, and fiori, meaning flower. The Italian cavoli in turn derived, through Latin, from an Indo-European source that meant hollow stem, a source that also gave rise in the Germanic language family to cole, as in coleslaw, and kale, a kind of headless cabbage. The vegetable and its name were introduced to England in the late sixteenth century.
A vegetable that belongs to the cabbage family, cauliflower is characterized by a tightly packed, white head of undeveloped flowers that is encircled by green leaves.