Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Dendrite
/ˈdɛndraɪt/noun
One of the branching fibres of a nerve cell that receive signals from other neurons.
The Greek roots
δένδρον
déndron
tree
Literally: “tree-like”
Follow a root:δένδρον6 words
The story of the word
Geologists had the word first, for the black tree-shaped mineral stains that appear on split rock and are regularly mistaken for fossil ferns. The anatomist Wilhelm His applied it to nerve branches in the 1880s, when staining methods finally showed a neuron's shape whole. The trees can be enormous: a single Purkinje cell in the cerebellum carries a flat fan of dendrites taking input from something on the order of a hundred thousand fibres.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
rhododendronphilodendrondendrochronologydendrology
In a sentence
Learning a skill thickens the dendrites, not just the connections between them.