bud

Etymology 1

From Middle English budde (“bud, seed pod”), from Proto-Germanic *buddǭ (compare Dutch bot (“bud”), German Hagebutte (“hip, rosehip”), regional German Butzen (“seed pod”), Swedish dialect bodd (“head”)), perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *bʰew-, *bu- (“to swell”).

noun

1. A newly sprouted leaf or blossom that has not yet unfolded.
   After a long, cold winter, the trees finally began to produce buds.
2. (figurative) Something that has begun to develop.
   breast buds
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. (usually uncountable, slang) Potent cannabis taken from the flowering part of the plant (the "bud"), or marijuana generally.
   Hey bro, want to smoke some bud?
5. A weaned calf in its first year, so called because the horns are then beginning to bud.
6. (dated, term of endearment) A 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. 1874, Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, a Popular Journal of General Literature

verb

1. (intransitive) To form buds.
   The trees are finally starting to bud.
2. (intransitive) To reproduce by splitting off buds.
   Yeast reproduces by budding.
3. (intransitive) To begin to grow, or to issue from a stock in the manner of a bud, as a horn.
4. (intransitive) To be like a bud in respect to youth and freshness, or growth and promise.
5. (transitive) 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: […] 2013, Julie Brown, The Brownstone, page 263
   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 1 September 2020, Tom Lamont, “The butcher's shop that lasted 300 years (give or take)”, in The Guardian
6. (transitive) To graft by inserting a bud under the bark of another tree.

Etymology 2

Back-formation from buddy.

noun

1. (informal, Canada, US) Buddy, 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. 27 November 2018, April Wolfe, “Anna And The Apocalypse is a Holiday-horror Cocktail of Singing, Maiming, and Clichés”, in The A.V. Club, archived from the original on 2019-11-04
2. (informal, chiefly Canadian) used to address a male
   [T]hen he shrugged his shoulders and said, with admirable philosophy: "Well, that's life, ain't it, bud?" 1946, George Johnston, Skyscrapers in the Mist, page 87