Spawn

How to spell spawn

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce spawn

What does spawn mean?

1. verbTo produce or give rise to something, often in large numbers.
2. verbOf fish, frogs, or other aquatic animals, to release or deposit eggs.
3. nounThe mass of eggs deposited by fish, frogs, or molluscs.

Spawn in a sentence

• verb

  A single viral post can spawn dozens of imitations within hours.

• verb

  Salmon swim upstream each autumn to spawn in the gravel beds where they hatched.

• noun

  Clumps of frog spawn floated near the edge of the garden pond.

• verb

  Poor planning tends to spawn confusion across the whole team.

• verb

  The frogs return to the same pond every spring to spawn.

• noun

  The biologist scooped a sample of fish spawn from the shallow water.

Where does spawn come from?

Language of origin: French

Spawn traces back to the Anglo-Norman and Old French verb espaundre or espandre, meaning 'to spread out' or 'to shed', which itself came from the Latin expandere, literally 'to spread out' (from ex- 'out' and pandere 'to stretch'). The word entered English in the late 1300s, originally describing the way fish and frogs release and scatter their eggs in great spreading masses through the water. From that image of something released in vast numbers, the meaning broadened so that to spawn became to produce offspring in quantity, and later, figuratively, to give rise to anything that multiplies or proliferates. The same Latin pandere lies behind 'expand' and 'expanse', which helps explain why spawn carries that sense of spreading widely. The simple four-letter spelling hides its Latin parentage, and the silent-feeling 'aw' is the only real trap for a writer.

How the word is built

• spawn (single root, from Old French espandre: to spread out)