• seed •
Printable Version Pronunciation: seed • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb, transitive
Meaning: 1. To plant seeds. 2. To stimulate or precipitate growth or development, as to seed a new business with startup capital. 3. To arrange competitors in a tournament so that the stronger ones will meet later in the tournament.
Notes: A truly interesting semantic development is the term "seed" used in the language of sports (Meaning 3 above). It was first used in tennis and is based on the idea of laying out a tournament ladder using slips of paper to spread out the names of players the way seeds or seedlings are arranged, but in a way that keeps the best players apart until the later matches (a quite creative and useful analogy). The past tense seeded is a homonym of the unrelated verb seated though the confusion is understandable since the T between vowels is pronounced just like D in US English.
In Play: Using the verb in the sense of a precipitant of growth or other activity was popular back in the middle of the last century in this sense: "Scientists have tried to seed clouds with salt particles or silver iodide to induce them to release rain on drought-plagued land below." Today, however, sports fans are more likely to hear the word: "Bucknell was seeded 14 in the NCAA playoffs but surprised a more highly seeded team."
Word History: The English word seed comes to us from the verbal root se- "to sow" in Proto-Indo-European, the mother of most of the languages of Europe and India. In English we find seed and in German Saat. Russian and Latin added an -m suffix to produce semya, semeni in Russian and semen in Latin, imported whole into English to denote the seed of human and animal life. (We thank Peggy Nielsen for planting the seed in our heads that grew into today's Good Word.)
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