Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • In botany, subdivided into many distinct subordinate parts, which, however, not being jointed to the petiole, are not true leaflets: said of leaves.
  • Dividing once or repeatedly into sets of three or more branches: opposed to dichotomous.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective (Bot.) Subdivided into many distinct subordinate parts, which, however, not being jointed to the petiole, are not true leaflets; -- said of leaves.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective botany subdivided into many parts
  • adjective mathematics Describing a variable that has multiple (more than two) categories

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

poly- + -tomous

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Examples

  • The lack of resolution in more terminal internal nodes is common in studies using phylogenetic supertrees, but these studies also tend to have polytomous nodes basally as well

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles 2009

  • The comparative biology literature on this topic is deeper, focusing on developing methods to deal with soft polytomies by representing the branch lengths between the lineages derived from a polytomous node as a zero

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles 2009

  • The above results show that when large phylogenies are used containing polytomous nodes basally in the tree the researcher may expect to have substantially reduced statistical power to detect non-random phylogenetic community structure.

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles 2009

  • (CIs) in the middle and low titer groups were calculated using a polytomous logistic regression model, with the high titer group considered as control.

    Naturejobs - All Jobs 2009

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