Bud

How to spell bud

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bud

What does bud mean?

1. nounA small swelling on a plant from which a leaf, shoot, or flower will develop.
2. verbTo form or produce small growths from which leaves or flowers will emerge.
3. nounAn informal term for a close friend or companion.

Bud in a sentence

• noun

  Each bud on the rose stem will open into a flower by June.

• verb

  The apple trees usually bud in early spring once the frost lifts.

• noun

  He grabbed a coffee with his old college bud before the meeting.

• noun

  She pinched off every bud to encourage stronger roots.

• verb

  Yeast cells can bud to reproduce, forming a small offshoot.

• noun

  My fishing bud drove three hours just to join me at the lake.

Where does bud come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

Bud first appears in Middle English around the late 1300s as 'budde', meaning the small swelling on a plant from which a leaf, shoot, or flower will develop. Its earlier history is genuinely murky: it does not have a clear documented Old English ancestor, and scholars suspect a connection to Middle Dutch 'botte' or a similar Low German form for a sprouting growth, possibly tied to a sense of swelling or pushing out. From the literal plant sense the word branched into the verb 'to bud', meaning to start growing, and figuratively into 'budding' for anything promising and new. The modern American sense of 'bud' as a friendly term for a companion is a separate, much later development, a clipped and casual form of 'buddy' that took hold in the 1800s. Because the word is so short and phonetically plain, its only real spelling caution is keeping it apart from look-alikes such as 'bid', 'bad', and 'bled'.

How the word is built

• bud (single root; no prefix or suffix)