Other forms: seeds
A seed is the small hard thing a plant grows from. Plant seeds, a packet of seed, seeds in a sunflower.
It is countable for individual ones and uncountable for a quantity: grass seed, bird seed. Figuratively, a seed is a beginning: the seeds of doubt, sow the seeds of. And in sport, a seed is a ranked player placed in a draw so the best do not meet early — the top seed, seeded second. That last sense surprises people and comes from the idea of scattering the strong players evenly through the draw.
1nounseedThe small hard part of a plant that a new plant grows from.
“The seeds take about ten days to come up.”
2nounbeginningThe beginning of something that grows.
“That meeting planted the seeds of the whole scheme.”
3nounrankedA ranked player placed in a tournament draw.
“The top seed went out in the second round.”
seed is a beginning of growth.
Old English saed comes from the verb to sow — the same root as season, which was the sowing time, and semen. A seed is literally a thing sown, named for what is done to it rather than what it does.
Proto-Indo-European
*seh₁- — to sow, throw
Proto-Germanic
*sēdiz
Proto-West Germanic
*sād
Old English
sēd
Middle English
seed
English, today
seed
Built from
From Middle English seed, sede, side, from Old English sēd, sǣd (“seed, that which is sown”), from Proto-West Germanic sād, from Proto-Germanic sēdiz, from Proto-Indo-European seh₁- (“to sow, throw”). 2 Cognate with yol zeade (“seed”), frr sead, seed, siad, Siid, sädj, säid (“seed”), stq Säid (“seed”), West Frisian sied (“seed”), Dutch zaad (“seed”), German Saat (“seed; sowing”), li zaod (“seed”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk sæd (“seed”), Faroese and Icelandic sáð (“seed”), Swedish säd (“seed”), Gothic 𐍃𐌴𐌸𐍃 (“seed”); also Latin serō (“to sow, plant”), Latvian sēt (“to sow”), Lithuanian sėti (“to sow”), Bulgarian се́я (“to sow, plant”), Czech sít (“to sow”), mk сее (“to sow”), Polish siać (“to sow”), Russian се́ять (“to sow”), Serbo-Croatian се̏јати, sȅjati, си̏јати, sȉjati (“to sow”), Slovak siať (“to sow”), Slovene sejáti (“to sow”), Ukrainian сі́яти (“to sow”). More at sow.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA