Word.ws English Dictionary

sprouting

sprouting is the present participle and gerund of sprout.

Meaning of sprout

Verb

sprout (third-person singular simple present sprouts, present participle sprouting, simple past and past participle sprouted)

  1. (intransitive) To grow from seed; to germinate.
    • The crocuses should be sprouting after 2 months, provided they're well tended.
    Synonyms:
    stock
  2. (transitive) To cause to grow from a seed.
    • I sprouted beans and radishes and put them in my salad.
  3. (transitive) To deprive of sprouts.
    • to sprout potatoes
  4. (intransitive) To emerge from the ground as sprouts.
  5. (figuratively, intransitive) To emerge haphazardly from a surface.
    • Whiskers sprouted from the old man's chin.
  6. (figuratively, intransitive) To emerge or appear haphazardly.
    • A lot of coffee shops have sprouted up in this neighbourhood since the block of flats was put up.

See all 13 meanings of sprout

Noun

sprouting (plural sproutings)

  1. The act by which something sprouts.
    • The historical record before the war and after shows a tendency toward independent political action in the recurrent sproutings of numerous Labor Reform and Workingmen's parties[…]2009, Alan Dawley, Class and Community, page 196
    • What is unbearable, in fact, is the feeling, 13 years after 9/11, that America has been chasing its tail; that, in some whack-a-mole horror show, the quashing of a jihadi enclave here only spurs the sprouting of another there; that the ideology of Al Qaeda is still reverberating through a blocked...2014 November 17, Roger Cohen, “The horror! The horror! The trauma of ISIS [print version: International New York Times, 18 November 2014, p. 9]”, in The New York Times

Forms of sprouting

pluralsproutings

Phrases with sprouting

Questions about sprouting

What does sprouting mean?
Sprouting means the act by which something sprouts.
What is sprouting the present participle and gerund of?
Sprouting is the present participle and gerund of sprout.
What part of speech is sprouting?
Sprouting is a noun.
What is the plural of sprouting?
The plural of sprouting is sproutings.

Words near sprouting in the dictionary

  1. sprouters
  2. sproutest
  3. sprouteth
  4. sproutier
  5. sproutiest
  6. sprouting
  7. sprouting up
  8. sproutings
  9. sproutless
  10. sproutling
  11. sproutlings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sprouting (page history and authors); sprout (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “sprouting.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sprouting. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.