arborise

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

Latin arbor (“tree”) +‎ -ise

Verb

arborise (third-person singular simple present arborises, present participle arborising, simple past and past participle arborised)

  1. (intransitive) To develop a tree-like appearance.
    The nerve fibre arborises into multiple branches.
    • 1915, T. B. Johnston, Medical Applied Anatomy, London: A. and C. Black, Chapter 1, p. 4,
      Either in the spinal medulla or in the brain stem the axons end by arborising round nerve-cells and the impulses which they convey are transferred to these upper neurones.
    • 1964, Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, New York: Macmillan, Book 2, Chapter 2, p. 433,
      A hierarchy […] is not like a row of organ pipes; it is like a tree, arborizing downward.
  2. (transitive) To cause (something) to develop a tree-like appearance.
    • 2008, Jen Weaverling (ed.), Creative Flower Gardening, Minnetonka, MN: National Home Gardening Club, p. 128,
      Tall, wide shrubs take up a huge amount of space in a small garden, so remove the lower limbs to provide more space underneath. […] When you “arborize” the shrub by limbing it up, you’ll discover an elegant, multi-trunked structure […]
    • 2018, Richard Powers, The Overstory, New York: Norton,
      His seven-year-old brain fires and rewires, building arborized axons, dendrites, those tiny spreading trees.
  3. (transitive) To penetrate or fill (an area) with a tree-like structure.
    • 1967, Christine Brooke-Rose, “The Foot” in Susan Williams and Richard Glyn Jones (eds.), The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women, London: Penguin, 1996, p. 187,
      The imitation neurones I am composed of agitate their dendrites like mad ganglia that arborize the system as the cell bodies dance along the axis cylinder within the fibres of the foot that isn’t there […]
    • 1991, Donald G. McQuarrie, “Techniques of Resection and Reconstruction for Tongue and Mouth Cancer” in John S. Najarian and John P. Delaney (eds.), Progress in Cancer Surgery, St. Louis: Mosby, p. 254,
      The vessels penetrate the clavipectoral fascia […] . They then arborize the underside of the pectoralis major.

Derived terms
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