beet
Americannoun
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beets
plural
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any of various biennial plants belonging to the genus Beta, of the amaranth family, especially B. vulgaris, having a fleshy red or white root.
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the edible root of such a plant.
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the leaves of such a plant, served as a salad or cooked vegetable.
noun
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any chenopodiaceous plant of the genus Beta , esp the Eurasian species B. vulgaris , widely cultivated in such varieties as the sugar beet, mangelwurzel, beetroot, and spinach beet See also chard
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the leaves of any of several varieties of this plant, which are cooked and eaten as a vegetable
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the US name for beetroot
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of beet
First recorded before 1000; Middle English bete, Old English bēte, from Latin bēta
Explanation
A beet is a reddish-purple colored root vegetable. You can roast beets, slice them, and add them to a salad. When you peel a cooked beet, your fingers will be temporarily stained red. Beets are distinctive for their deep color and their round shape — though there are also a few varieties that are yellow. You can eat both the round, fleshy part of a beet plant and also its green leaves. The British version of beet, which is thought to have a Celtic origin, is beetroot.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
We head to outdoor restaurants where no one is present and the eager wait staff want to feed her bacon and me, my beet salad.
From Salon ● May 9, 2026
Next month, she said, organizers plan to honor the Japanese-Mexican Labor Assn., a union formed by sugar beet workers in 1903 that conducted a 48-day farmworker strike 123 years ago, long before Chavez.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 19, 2026
Benali added that sugar beet, citrus and vegetable farms had also been devastated by flooding.
From Barron's ● Feb. 13, 2026
Food companies started replacing it with cane or beet sugar more than a decade ago.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 14, 2026
I look around at the dishes piled in the sink, the strips of beet peel staining a wooden cutting board, a saucepan half full of translucent cabbage, a roasting pan charred and waxed with grease.
From "Orphan Train" by Christina Baker Kline
Researchers figured out how to make convincing replicas of its red, orange and yellow candies using natural ingredients like beets and turmeric.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 18, 2026
They’re vegetarians: They eat grass, alfalfa, cassava, sweet potato, carrots, beets, and, at the zoo, a commercial feed.
From Slate ● May 27, 2026
Betaine is a small molecule found in foods like beets and spinach, but the body also makes it on its own.
From Science Daily ● Nov. 13, 2025
The last factory in California that turns sugar beets into sugar is shutting down after 78 years, according to the company that owns the factory.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 19, 2025
He sat in the chair all morning—rather like an overseer-watching while I plowed, harrowed and then planted the two rows of beets.
From "Z for Zachariah" by Robert C. O’Brien
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