Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A mineral crystallizing in another mineral in the form of a branching or treelike mark.
  • noun A rock or mineral bearing such a mark or marks.
  • noun A branched protoplasmic extension of a nerve cell that conducts impulses from adjacent cells inward toward the cell body. A single nerve may possess many dendrites.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In neural., one of the protoplasmic processes of a nerve-cell: opposed to *neurite, the axis-cylinder. See cut at *neuron.
  • noun A stone or a mineral on or in which are figures resembling shrubs, trees, or mosses.
  • noun A complex crystalline growth of arborescent form, such as is common with metallic silver and copper.

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

  • noun (Min.) A stone or mineral on or in which are branching figures resembling shrubs or trees, produced by a foreign mineral, usually an oxide of manganese, as in the moss agate; also, a crystallized mineral having an arborescent form, e. g., gold or silver; an arborization.

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

  • noun cytology A slender projection of a nerve cell which conducts nerve impulses from a synapse to the body of the cell; a dendron.
  • noun cytology Slender cell process emanating from the cell bodies of dendritic cells and follicular dendritic cells of the immune system.
  • noun crystallography, metallurgy tree-like structure of crystals growing as material crystallizes

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun short fiber that conducts toward the cell body of the neuron

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Ancient Greek δενδρίτης (dendrites, "of or pertaining to a tree").

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Examples

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  • "It was too cold to form the lacy star-patterned crystals known as dendrites—the pretty snowflakes of Christmas cards. Too cold for the little pellets of graupel that accrete as ice crystals glue on layer after layer of supercooled droplets...."

    —David Laskin, The Children's Blizzard (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 120

    Another usage on axon.

    November 11, 2008