Seed (sports)

A seed is a competitor or team in a sport or other tournament who is given a preliminary ranking for the purposes of the draw. Players/teams are "planted" into the bracket in a manner that is typically intended so that the best do not meet until later in the competition, usually based on regular season. The term was first used in tennis,^[1] and is based on the idea of laying out a tournament ladder by arranging slips of paper with the names of players on them the way seeds or seedlings are arranged in a garden: smaller plants up front, larger ones behind.^[2]

Sometimes the remaining competitors in a single-elimination tournament will be "re-seeded" so that the highest surviving seed is made to play the lowest surviving seed in the next round, the second-highest plays the second-lowest, etc. This may be done after each round, or only at selected intervals.^[3]

^ Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (2002), Fifth Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, Page 2737, ISBN 0-19-860457-2
^ Beard, Robert. "seed". AlphaDictionary.com. Lexiteria. Retrieved 18 March 2012.
^ [1] Archived 2015-09-18 at the Wayback Machine

[1] Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (2002), Fifth Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, Page 2737, ISBN 0-19-860457-2

[2] Beard, Robert. "seed". AlphaDictionary.com. Lexiteria. Retrieved 18 March 2012.

[3] [1] Archived 2015-09-18 at the Wayback Machine

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