Because the ancient Romans believed that eating leeks gave a person a clear, strong voice, the emperor Nero, famous for fiddling while Rome burned, is said to have consumed leek soup everyday so that his speeches could be heard far and wide. However, whereas Nero would have called this onionlike plant a porrum, the English have used the name leek for more than a thousand years. The ultimate source of the English name for this vegetable was an Indo-European word pronounced something like leug, a word meaning to bend that was likely bestowed on the plant because of its pliable stem. The same Indo-European word also evolved into the word lock, a lock of hair being a curled or “bent” cluster of strands (but the lock that means door fastener derives from an unrelated source). The word leek is also a part of several English words that originated as compounds, including garlic. Gar, an Old English word meaning spear, was combined with leek because garlic, a member of the same plant family as the leek, has pointed, spearlike shoots. Another compound involving leek is leighton, formed from leek and from the Old English tun, meaning enclosure; a leighton is therefore a leek enclosure or, more broadly, a garden. First recorded in the tenth century, this synonym for garden became obsolete in the late eighteenth century except as a surname (as in Frederick Leighton, the Victorian painter) and as a place name (as in Leighton Buzzard, a town north of London).
A type of onion and an herb of the lily family.
A member of the onion family.
A vegetable akin to an onion, possessing wide and flat leaves, along with an expanded, albeit not heavily bulbous, white stem and root. This vegetable produces a mild and sweet flavor similar to that of an onion.
Leeks are a type of vegetable that belongs to the same family as onions and garlic, but unlike those, they don’t form a bulb. The lower part of the stem is covered with soil, which results in the stem being white in color. Leeks have a mild yet distinctive flavor, and they are often used in soups, stews, and as a vegetable dish. They also contain a small amount of vitamin C.