spud

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun Informal A potato.
• noun A sharp spadelike tool used for rooting or digging out weeds.
• noun A short section of pipe or a threaded fitting that completes a connection, as between a longer pipe and a nozzle, valve, or meter.
• transitive verb To remove with a sharp spadelike tool.
• transitive verb To begin drilling operations on.

from The Century Dictionary.

• To remove by means of a spud: often with up or out.
• To drill (a hole) by spudding (which see, below).
• noun A stout knife or dagger.
• noun A small spade, or a spade having a small blade, with a handle of any length; a small cutting-blade fixed in the axis of its handle, somewhat like a chisel with a very long handle, for cutting the roots of weeds without stooping.
• noun A spade-shaped tool for recovering lost or broken tools in a tube-well.
• noun A nail driven into the timbers of a drift or shaft, or fastened in some other way, so as to mark a surveying-station.
• noun Any short and thick thing: usually in contempt.
• noun A curved chisel-like tool for removing bark.
• noun One of several heavy vertical pieces of timber shod with a pointed iron at the lower end, arranged to slide in guides on a floating dredge. When lowered to the bottom the spuds anchor the dredge and hold it in place against the push of the dredging machinery.
• noun In archaeology, one of a class of pecked or polished stone implements varying considerably in size and form, but always having a rather broad blade with a sort of handle of variable length: often referred to as spade-like or paddle-shaped implements.
• noun In surgery: A flat spade-like instrument used for the detachment of soft parts from bone.
• noun An instrument of similar shape used in the extraction of foreign bodies from the eye.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun A sharp, narrow spade, usually with a long handle, used by farmers for digging up large-rooted weeds; a similarly shaped implement used for various purposes.
• noun obsolete A dagger.
• noun Local, U.S. Anything short and thick; specifically, a piece of dough boiled in fat.
• noun colloq. A potato.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun A hole in a sock.
• noun obsolete, US, dialect Anything short and thick; specifically, a piece of dough boiled in fat.
• verb drilling To begin drilling an oil well; to drill by moving the drill bit and shaft up and down, or by raising and dropping a bit.
• verb roofing To remove the roofing aggregate and most of the bituminous top coating by scraping and chipping.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun an edible tuber native to South America; a staple food of Ireland
• verb initiate drilling operations, as for petroleum
• noun a sharp hand shovel for digging out roots and weeds
• verb produce buds, branches, or germinate