Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Directed away from a central organ or section.
- adj. Carrying impulses from the central nervous system to an effector.
- n. An efferent organ or body part, such as a blood vessel.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Conveying outward or away; deferent: as, the efferent nerves, which convey a nervous impulse from the ganglionic center outward to the muscles or other active tissue. In the system of blood-vessels the arteries are the efferent vessels, conveying blood from the heart to all parts of the body, while the veins are the afferent vessels, bringing blood to the heart. In any gland or glandular system the vessel which takes up and carries off a secretion is efferent.
- n. In anatomy and physiology, a vessel or nerve which conveys outward.
- n. A river flowing from and bearing away the waters of a lake.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Conveying outward, or discharging; -- applied to certain blood vessels, lymphatics, nerves, etc.
- adj. Conveyed outward; ; -- opposed to
afferent . - n. An efferent duct or stream.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a nerve that conveys impulses toward or to muscles or glands
- adj. of nerves and nerve impulses; conveying information away from the CNS
Etymologies
- From Latin efferēns, present active participle of efferō ("bring or carry out"), from ē ("out of"), short form of ex, + ferō ("carry, bear"). (Wiktionary)
- From Latin efferēns, efferent-, present participle of efferre, to carry off : ex-, ex- + ferre, to carry; see bher-1 in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“The fibres which come ultimately from the ventral aspect of the spinal marrow, are those which carry an influence outwards, and produce a contraction in the muscles, and are therefore called efferent or motor.”
“Whatever the specifics, they wrote, the important thing is that the stimulation affected only “a few cubic millimeters of neural tissue,” which means that “the depression probably resulted from the stimulation of afferent, efferent, or passing fibers within the substantia nigra or from the inhibition of those fibers.””
“Motor neurons make up the efferent neurons of both the somatic and autonomic nervous systems.”
“The PNS contains two forms of nerves: afferent nerves, which relay sensory information to the CNS, and efferent nerves, which relay motor commands from the CNS to various muscles and glands.”
“The second efferent system is the autonomic nervous system, which carries motor information to smooth muscles, cardiac muscle, and various glands.”
“Her stances were aesthetic and efferent, the former being reading for emotional/artistic reasons and the latter for informational reasons.”
“Another thought experiment (Kirk 1974b) involves a team of micro-Lilliputians who invade Gulliver™s head, disconnect his afferent and efferent nerves, monitor the inputs from his afferent nerves, and send outputs down his efferent nerves to produce behavior indistinguishable from what it would have been originally.”
“Human gustatory representations are points in a four-dimensional state space, with each dimension coding for activity rates generated by gustatory stimuli in each type of taste receptor (sweet, salty, sour, bitter) and their segregated efferent pathways.”
“Each dimension corresponds to activity rates in one of three classes of photoreceptors present in the human retina and their efferent paths: the red-green opponent pathway, yellow-blue opponent pathway, and black-white (contrast) opponent pathway.”
“The boat's central director-essentially a computer whose input came from the instruments and whose efferent impulses went directly to the controls-performed the basic operations.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘efferent’.
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phrontistery - e
from phrontistery.info
eagre, earing, earwig, easement, eau-de-nil, ebberman, ebeneous, ?boulement, ebriection, ?brillade, ebrious, ebullioscope and 616 more...
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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SCIE - neurology
abducens.....draw..., ablation.....carr..., acetylcholine......., adrenalin.....nea..., afferent.....to c..., agnosia.....no kn..., alar.....wing-like, alexia.....no words, alveus.....canal, amacrine.....no l..., ambidextrous........, ambiguus.....doub... and 701 more...
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ex-
from; out; beyond; away from; out of; thoroughly
expel, excess, expatriate, expatriateextermi..., exalt, exanimate, ex-husband, eject, ejecteccentric, fferent, efferent, escape
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artoparts's Words
illation, finite, edify, abide, abrade, vouch, amiss, vociferate, perusing, techantiquery, rigamarole, holon and 615 more...
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smart pple werdz
petard, anxiogenic, paratactic, nonce, baldachin, eugenic, conflagration, innervate, counterfactual, corpuscular, reticulate, apodictic and 93 more...
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Carry Me Home
Another kind of bear list: words bearing the -fer suffix ("that which carries"), the -ferous suffix ("bearing," "producing," or "yielding").
Also see (if you like) Carry Me Home Again.aquifer, conifer, umbellifer, transfer, thurifer, defer, telfer, suffer, rotifer, refer, foraminifer, poriferous and 157 more...
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Monovocalics
Words that have only one of the vowels. On this list I include only words with at least three vowels. When I first started the list, if a word had several forms, I generally listed only the one wit...
syzygy, mirific, cumulus, homolog, monocot, bedewed, jezebel, referee, bikini, minikin, locomotor, terebenthene and 2359 more...
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Tory's First Wordie List
perambulate, mumpsimus, euphoric, peripatetic, mellifluous, soporific, neologism, nihilism, nepotism, effervescent, lascivious, esoteric and 217 more...
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INTERP - VOCABULARY
The vocabulary of conference interpreting. I commend this list to those who want to know more about the profession and to those who wish to organize their knowledge about the profession. To aspirin...
retour language, A-language, B-language, C-language, relay language, take sy on relay, language booth, booth meeting, mic, mike, mission, freelance interpr... and 2086 more...
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April 2010
ructus, eructation, emesis, merycism, cachexia, copremesis, fistula, hydrocephalus, glottis, afferent, efferent, bleb and 27 more...
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vocab muscle
velleity, meretricious, shibboleth, roister, reify, nostrum, surfeit, miscegenation, aegis, festschrift, dithyramb, panegyric and 84 more...
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skipvia's Words
syzygy, egg, lossy, catharsis, impuissance, truckle, obsequious, sequoia, sonot khazoot, alizarin, sepulchre, klister and 434 more...
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2012 Vocab sampler
adumbrate, brausetabletten, sententious, caprine, fictile, Malthusian, denouement, perfidy, myringa, kerfuffle, dalliance, abstemious and 88 more...
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jcaz's list
new words or not-to-familiar words
cursory, serendipity, sundry, harbinger, succinct, afferent, efferent, egregious, goad, platitude, yoga, karma and 39 more...
Tweets
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artoparts See: afferent Oct 31, 2008