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bud

nounverbnouncommon in dialogue

  • //bʌd//

A newly sprouted leaf or blossom that has not yet unfolded.

noun

  1. 1

    A newly sprouted leaf or blossom that has not yet unfolded.

    After a long, cold winter, the trees finally began to produce buds.

    Among Turks, pills consisting of hemp buds, muscat nuts, saffron, and honey were a popular aphrodisiac.

  2. 2

    figurativeSomething that has begun to develop.

    breast buds

  3. 3

    A small rounded body in the process of splitting from an organism, which may grow into a genetically identical new organism.

    In this slide, you can see a yeast cell forming buds.

  4. 4

    slangPotent cannabis taken from the flowering part of the plant (the "bud"), or marijuana generally. Cannabis that has been taken from the flowering part of the plant intended to be smoked.

    You got any buds?

  5. 5

    slangPotent cannabis taken from the flowering part of the plant (the "bud"), or marijuana generally. Marijuana.

    Hey bro, want to smoke some bud?

  6. 6

    A weaned calf in its first year, so called because the horns are then beginning to bud.

  7. 7

    datedA pretty young girl.

    My pretty bud was unfolding and I was not there to see it. She was developing so rapidly, I felt I could not be from her a day without missing some sweetness that could never come again.

Etymology

From Middle English budde, bodde (“bud, seed pod”), from Old English *budde, from Proto-West Germanic *buʀdā, from Proto-Germanic *buzdǭ (compare archaic German Butte (“rosehip”), Swedish dialect bodd (“head”)), perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *bʰew-, *bu- (“to swell”). Compare also German Low German Butte, Butt (“bud”), Dutch bot (“bud”), regional German Butz, Butzen (“seed pod; apple core”), German Low German Haagbutt ("rosehip"; Haagbudden (“rosehips”, plural)).

verb

  1. 1

    To form buds.

    The trees are finally starting to bud.

    And it came to pass, that on the morrow Moses went into the tabernacle of witness; and, behold, the rod of Aaron for the house of Levi was budded, and brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms, and yielded almonds.

  2. 2

    To reproduce by splitting off buds.

    Yeast reproduces by budding.

  3. 3

    To begin to grow, or to issue from a stock in the manner of a bud, as a horn.

    Seeds of dissent were budding among the recruits.

  4. 4

    To be like a bud in respect to youth and freshness, or growth and promise.

    Young budding virgin, fair and fresh and sweet, / Whither away, or where is thy abode?

  5. 5

    To put forth as a bud.

    What appeared the same to us really wasn't. Every day was different, if we looked closely enough. Like the topiary tree that finally budded a rose after Terrence died: […]

    Once, he was put on a course of potent hormone pills, coming off them when he woke up one morning to discover he was budding breasts

  6. 6

    To graft by inserting a bud under the bark of another tree.

noun

  1. 1

    informalBuddy, friend.

    I like to hang out with my buds on Saturday night.

    Anna's best bud, John (Malcolm Cumming), harbors a secret crush on her, which is indicative of the lazier, more derivative portions of the story that simply repeat tropes rather than comment on them.

  2. 2

    informalSynonym of guy, term of address for a man or person.

    [T]hen he shrugged his shoulders and said, with admirable philosophy: "Well, that's life, ain't it, bud?"

  3. 3

    informalBrother.

    So I'm walking along, minding my own business, right, and suddenly I found myself trapped in a nuclear family. Oh, they were all around me, mom, dad, bud, sis.

Etymology

Back-formation from buddy.

Forms

plural
buds
past tense
budded
past participle
budded
present participle
budding
third person singular
buds
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).