A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
spawn
Spawn is the mass of eggs released into water by fish, amphibians, and many invertebrates, and the verb is the act of releasing them. Frog spawn comes in clumps, toad spawn in strings, and fish spawn is scattered or buried depending on the species. The same word is used in mushroom growing for the fungal material used to start a crop, which is a separate sense that arrived by a different route.
Etymology
The word came into English from Old French, from a verb meaning to spread out or shed, and behind that is the Latin verb that also gives English expand. The mushroom sense is the same word applied to fungal mycelium in the seventeenth century, on the reasoning that it was what the crop grew from, so a mushroom grower buys spawn exactly as a fish farmer would.
Notes
Mass synchronized spawning is one of the more remarkable events in the natural world and it is often keyed to the moon. Coral on the Great Barrier Reef spawns over a few nights after a full moon in late spring, with hundreds of species releasing at once and the water turning opaque; palolo worms in the Pacific do the same on a date that has been used as a calendar for centuries.