seed

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

• noun A mature plant ovule containing an embryo.
• noun A small dry fruit, spore, or other propagative plant part.
• noun Seeds considered as a group.
• noun The seed-bearing stage of a plant.
• noun A larval shellfish or a hatchling fish.
• noun An egg or cocoon of certain insects.
• noun Something that resembles a seed, as.
• noun A tiny bubble in a piece of glass.
• noun Medicine A form of a radioactive isotope that is used to localize and concentrate the amount of radiation administered to a body site, such as a tumor.
• noun A source or beginning; a germ.
• noun A small amount of material used to start a chemical reaction.
• noun A small crystal used to start a crystallization process.
• noun Offspring; progeny.
• noun Family stock; ancestry.
• noun Sperm; semen.
• noun Sports A player who has been seeded for a tournament, often at a given rank.
• intransitive verb To plant seeds in (land, for example); sow.
• intransitive verb To plant (a crop, for example) as seeds in soil.
• intransitive verb To remove the seeds from (fruit).
• intransitive verb To furnish with something that grows or stimulates growth or development.
• intransitive verb Medicine To cause (cells or a tumor, for example) to grow or multiply.
• intransitive verb Meteorology To sprinkle (a cloud) with particles, as of silver iodide, in order to disperse it or to produce precipitation.
• intransitive verb To arrange (the drawing for positions in a tournament) so that the more skilled contestants meet in the later rounds.
• intransitive verb To rank (a contestant) in this way.
• intransitive verb To help (a business, for example) in its early development.
• intransitive verb To sow seed.
• intransitive verb To pass into the seed-bearing stage.
• intransitive verb Medicine To grow or multiply, as a tumor.
• adjective Set aside for planting a new crop.
• adjective Intended to help in early stages.
• idiom (go/run) To pass into the seed-bearing stage.
• idiom (go/run) To become weak or devitalized; deteriorate.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The fertilized and matured ovule of the higher or flowering plants.
• noun The male fecundating fluid; semen; sperm or milt, as of fish; spat, as of oysters: without a plural.
• noun Very young animals, as oysters.
• noun Progeny; offspring; children; descendants: as. the seed of Abraham; the seed of David.
• noun Race; generation; birth.
• noun That from which anything springs: firstprinciple; origin: often in the plural: as, the seeds of virtue or vice; to sow the seeds of discord.
• noun Same as red-seed: a fishermen's term.
• noun The egg or eggs of the commercial silkwormmoth, Sericaria mori.
• noun In glass-making, one of the small bubbles which form in imperfectly fused glass, and which, when the glass is worked, assume elongated or ovoid forms, resembling the shapes of some seeds.
• In sugar manufacturing, to start the process of crystallization in (concentrated syrup) by placing crystals of sugar, from a previous step in the process, to serve as seed or starting-points.
• noun The larvæ of the lac-insect.
• noun In sugar manufacturing, crystals of sugar placed in concentrated syrup to serve as starting-points for fresh crystallization.