arborise

English

Alternative forms

• arborize

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, chapter 1, in Medical Applied Anatomy,‎^[1], London: A. and C. Black, page 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^[2], 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, editor, Creative Flower Gardening‎^[3], Minnetonka, MN: National Home Gardening Club, page 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^[4], 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, Richard Glyn Jones, editors, The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women‎^[5], London: Penguin, published 1996, page 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, John P. Delaney, editors, Progress in Cancer Surgery‎^[6], St. Louis: Mosby, page 254:

     The vessels penetrate the clavipectoral fascia […] . They then arborize the underside of the pectoralis major.

Derived terms

• arborization