The madness of March brings with it a whole hustling host of intriguing basketball words, with one of the more beguiling of these being “seed.” I have to thank Zac Mahlum for suggesting that we dig into it, so to speak, and find out where it came from.

We all know, of course, that a seed is a “ripened plant ovule containing an embryo,” as the American Heritage Dictionary defines it, “chiefly, when in the form of ‘grains’ or small roundish bodies,” as the Oxford English Dictionary further elaborates.

A “seed” in sporting terms is a player or team placed in a tournament; “to seed” is to arrange the contestants, especially the higher-ranked teams, so that they encounter one another in the later phases of the championships on more or less equal grounds (after having fought their way through the earlier stages).

It is a very old word indeed, first popping up, as seeds tend to do, in the early 9th century, with its earliest forms coming to us from the Old English sǽd, from the Old Frisian word sêd, the Old Saxon sâd, the Middle Dutch saet (the modern Dutch word being zaad) and the Old High German word sât (the modern German being saat). It may ultimately (and a tad speculatively, I must confess, as I am only an amateur at this level) arise from the very old Gothic word sêds (the “d” standing in for a Germanic letter without an English equivalent), from manasêds, meaning “mankind,” but also related to the same Germanic root as the word “sow.”

So what does this have to do with sports?

The answer: lawn tennis.

Starting around the turn of the last century, perhaps because the game was played on manicured, seeded lawns, the idea of carefully “seeding” tournaments sprang up, with this handy definition from Spalding’s Lawn Tennis Annual, from 1900: “It is generally advisable to ‘seed’ the draw in handicap tournaments so that the players in each class shall be separated as far as possible one from another.”

An article from the June 23, 1924 issue of the London Times expounds on this idea, “This year, for the first time, the draw has been ‘seeded.’ … In some countries the seeding is designed to keep the better players apart until the final stages.” The 1933 Aldin Book of Outdoor Games, with rules for various sports, including tennis, brings up the word as a noun for the first time, with this offbeat line, “‘But why put my beloved lawners last?’ wails the Thibetan ‘seed.’” (“Thibet” being a variant of “Tibet”).

A seed-field, incidentally, is what it reads like: a field of sowed seeds. A good early example can be found in 1831, in Sartor Resartus, by the enigmatic British historian Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), with the line, “For a speculative man, ‘whose seedfield,’ in the sublime words of the Poet, ‘is Time,’ no conquest is important but that of new ideas.”

So now you know what seeds have to do with basketball. Here’s to the Huskies and their seeding!