A small piece cut from a plant — a short stem with a few leaves or little flowers still on it. Think of the tiny bit of green a restaurant puts on top of your plate, or the small branch of rosemary you drop into a pot of soup. Two things make it a sprig rather than a branch: it is small enough to hold between your fingers, and it still has its leaves or flowers attached. A bare stick is not a sprig. You meet the word most often in cooking (a sprig of mint, a sprig of parsley, a sprig of thyme) and in decorating (a sprig of holly at Christmas, a sprig of flowers pinned to a jacket). "A sprig of" is almost a fixed phrase — the word rarely appears alone. There is also a verb, to sprig, meaning to decorate cloth with a small plant pattern, but you will almost never need it. The origin is not fully settled: it comes to us through Middle English and may be related to old Low German words for a thin dry twig, and to English spray in its "small branch" meaning.