vanilla

vanilla (vəˈnɪlə)
—n
1.	any tropical climbing orchid of the genus Vanilla, esp V. plonifolia, having spikes of large fragrant greenish-yellow flowers and long fleshy pods containing the seeds (beans)
2.	the pod or bean of certain of these plants, used to flavour food, etc
3.	a flavouring extract prepared from vanilla beans and used in cooking
—adj
4.	flavoured with or as if with vanilla: vanilla ice cream
5.	slang ordinary or conventional: a vanilla kind of guy
[C17: from New Latin, from Spanish vainilla pod, from vaina a sheath, from Latin vāgīna sheath]

vanilla

of ordinary sexual preferences" is 1970s, from notion of whiteness and the common choice of vanilla ice cream. Vanillin is from 1868.

vanilla va·nil·la (və-nĭl'ə)
n.

1. Any of various tropical American vines of the genus Vanilla, especially V. planifolia, cultivated for its long narrow seedpods from which a flavoring agent is obtained.

2. The seedpod of this plant. Also called vanilla bean.

3. A flavoring extract prepared from the cured seedpods of this plant or produced synthetically.

adj.
Flavored with vanilla.

vanilla definition mod. plain; dull. (See also beige.) : The entire production was sort of vanilla, but it was okay. n. a Caucasian. : Some vanilla's on the phone—selling something, I guess.

vanilla definition

1. (Default flavour of ice cream in the US) Ordinary flavour, standard. When used of food, very often does not mean that the food is flavoured with vanilla extract! For example, "vanilla wonton soup" means ordinary wonton soup, as opposed to hot-and-sour wonton soup. Applied to hardware and software, as in "Vanilla Version 7 Unix can't run on a vanilla PDP 11/34." Also used to orthogonalise chip nomenclature; for instance, a 74V00 means what TI calls a 7400, as distinct from a 74LS00, etc. This word differs from canonical in that the latter means "default", whereas vanilla simply means "ordinary". For example, when hackers go to a chinese restaurant, hot-and-sour wonton soup is the canonical wonton soup to get (because that is what most of them usually order) even though it isn't the vanilla wonton soup.
[Jargon File]
(1994-11-04)
2. Snobol4 by Catspaw, Inc. for MS-DOS.
(ftp://cs.arizona.edu/snobol4/vanilla.arc).
(1992-02-05)