Spawn

7 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Spawn \Spawn\, n. [[root]170. See {Spawn}, v. t.]
     1. The ova, or eggs, of fishes, oysters, and other aquatic
        animals.
        [1913 Webster]
  
     2. Any product or offspring; -- used contemptuously.


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     3. (Hort.) The buds or branches produced from underground
        stems.
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     4. (Bot.) The white fibrous matter forming the matrix from
        which fungi.
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     {Spawn eater} (Zool.), a small American cyprinoid fish
        ({Notropis Hudsonius}) allied to the dace.
        [1913 Webster]

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Spawn \Spawn\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Spawned}; p. pr. & vb. n.
     {Spawning}.] [OE. spanen, OF. espandre, properly, to shed,
     spread, L. expandere to spread out. See {Expand}.]
     1. To produce or deposit (eggs), as fishes or frogs do.
        [1913 Webster]
  
     2. To bring forth; to generate; -- used in contempt.
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              One edition [of books] spawneth another. --Fuller.
        [1913 Webster]

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Spawn \Spawn\, v. i.
     1. To deposit eggs, as fish or frogs do.
        [1913 Webster]
  
     2. To issue, as offspring; -- used contemptuously.
        [1913 Webster]

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

  spawn
       n : the mass of eggs deposited by fish or amphibians or molluscs
       v 1: call forth [syn: {engender}, {breed}]
       2: lay spawn; "The salmon swims upstream to spawn"

From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:

  71 Moby Thesaurus words for "spawn":
     albumen, bear, beget, breed, bring about, bring forth,
     bring into being, brood, call into being, cause, caviar, clutch,
     coin, conceive, concoct, contrive, cook up, create, deposit,
     design, develop, devise, discover, dream up, drop, egg, egg white,
     eggshell, engender, evolve, fabricate, farrow, father, fish eggs,
     frame, fry, generate, get, give being to, give birth to,
     give rise to, glair, hatch, improvise, invent, lay, litter, make,
     make do with, make up, mature, mint, nest, originate, ovule,
     parent, plan, procreate, produce, roe, sire, spat, strike out,
     think out, think up, vitellus, white, yellow, yield, yolk, young
  
  

From Jargon File (4.3.1, 29 Jun 2001) [jargon]:

  spawn n.,vi. 1. [techspeak] In Unix parlance, to create a child process
     from within a process. Technically this is a `fork'; the term `spawn' is
     a bit more general and is used for threads (lightweight processes) as
     well as traditional heavyweight processes. 2. In gaming, meant to
     indicate where (`spawn-point') and when a player comes to life (or
     `re-spawns') after being killed. Opposite of {frag}.
  
  

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [foldoc]:

  spawn
       
           To create a {child process} in a
          {multitasking} {operating system}.  E.g. {Unix}'s {fork}
          {system call} or one of the spawn() library routines provided
          by most {MS-DOS}, {Novell NetWare} and {OS/2} {C} compilers -
          spawnl(), spawnle(), etc.
       
          (1995-03-28)