Seed

How to spell seed

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce seed

What does seed mean?

1. nounThe small reproductive unit of a flowering plant, from which a new plant can grow.
2. verbTo sow or plant an area with the reproductive grains of a plant.
3. nounA competitor given a ranking in a tournament so that the strongest are kept apart in early rounds.

Seed in a sentence

• noun

  She pressed a single sunflower seed into the damp soil.

• verb

  The council plans to seed the bare verges with wildflowers this spring.

• noun

  The top seed cruised through her opening match without dropping a game.

• noun

  Each pumpkin seed was pressed gently into the compost.

• verb

  Farmers seed the field in straight rows for an even crop.

• noun

  An unexpected loss by the number two seed shook up the draw.

Where does seed come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly native English word, descending from Old English sǣd, meaning 'that which is sown' and ultimately tied to the verb sāwan, 'to sow'. It traces back through the Proto-Germanic sēdiz, the source also of Dutch zaad and German Saat, all sharing the underlying sense of scattering grain across the ground. The same ancient root, meaning literally 'to put or scatter into the earth', links seed to the everyday verb 'to sow', so the two words are agricultural cousins. From the literal grain that grows a plant, English extended the word figuratively to mean a beginning or origin, as in 'the seed of an idea', and later to the tournament sense of ranking a strong competitor. The spelling trap is purely the homophone: seed sounds identical to 'cede' (to give up), yet the two are unrelated, seed being homegrown Germanic and cede being Latin.

How the word is built

• seed (from Old English sǣd: that which is sown), a single unanalysable root word