sprout

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

• intransitive verb To begin to grow; give off shoots or buds.
• intransitive verb To emerge and develop rapidly.
• intransitive verb To allow or cause to come forth and grow.
• noun Young plant growth, such as a bud or shoot.
• noun Something resembling or suggestive of a sprout, as in rapid growth.
• noun The young shoots of plants such as alfalfa and soybean, usually eaten raw.
• noun Brussels sprouts.

from The Century Dictionary.

• Specifically, used to designate the action of silver during solidification. The molten silver beneath the thin solid crust forces up the crust with explosive violence and a part of it solidifies in the form of trees or sprouts. This action is attributed to the oxygen absorbed by the silver while above the melting-point, and seeking to escape at the point of solidification of the metal. Also vegetate.
• noun A shoot of a plant.
• noun Specifically plural Young coleworts.
• To shoot forth, as a bud from a seed or stock; begin to grow; spring: said of a young vegetable growth, or, by extension, of animal growth.
• To put forth shoots; bear buds.
• To spring up; grow upward.
• To spread into ramifications.
• To produce or afford by sprouting; grow: as, to sprout antlers; to sprout a mustache.
• To remove sprouts from: as, to sprout potatoes.
• noun In forestry, a tree which has grown from a stump or root. A shoot is a sprout which has not reached a height of three feet.

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

• transitive verb To cause to sprout.
• transitive verb To deprive of sprouts.
• noun The shoot of a plant; a shoot from the seed, from the stump, or from the root or tuber, of a plant or tree; more rarely, a shoot from the stem of a plant, or the end of a branch.
• noun Young coleworts; Brussels sprouts.
• noun (Bot.) See under Brussels.
• intransitive verb To shoot, as the seed of a plant; to germinate; to push out new shoots; hence, to grow like shoots of plants.
• intransitive verb obsolete To shoot into ramifications.

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

• noun A new growth on a plant, whether from seed or other parts.
• noun A child.
• noun A Brussels sprout.
• noun An edible germinated seed.
• verb horticulture To grow, where the initial state is a seed; to germinate.
• verb To cause to grow from a seed.

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

• verb produce buds, branches, or germinate
• noun any new growth of a plant such as a new branch or a bud
• noun a newly grown bud (especially from a germinating seed)
• verb put forth and grow sprouts or shoots