To germinate is to grow or to develop. When a tiny seedling cracks through a seed casing and sprouts, it has germinated. The term is used for other things too, like when an idea germinates into a film or book.
Sometimes you want things to germinate, like the heirloom tomato seeds in your backyard garden. Sometimes what germinates is not desirable — like how joblessness, economic problems, and generations of anti-Semitism provided a fertile ground for Nazism to germinate in pre-war Germany. The word's roots are in botany, but it has grown, or dare we say germinated, to be used for any time something grows and develops.
