The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:

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.
      [1913 Webster]

            One edition [of books] spawneth another. --Fuller.
      [1913 Webster]

The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:

Spawn \Spawn\, v. i.
   1. To deposit eggs, as fish or frogs do.
      [1913 Webster]

   2. To issue, as offspring; -- used contemptuously.
      [1913 Webster]

The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:

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.
      [1913 Webster]

   3. (Hort.) The buds or branches produced from underground
      stems.
      [1913 Webster]

   4. (Bot.) The white fibrous matter forming the matrix from
      which fungi.
      [1913 Webster]

   Spawn eater (Zool.), a small American cyprinoid fish
      (Notropis Hudsonius) allied to the dace.
      [1913 Webster]

WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):

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

Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0:

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



The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003):

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.


The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):

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)