Author Topic: DENDRITE common in yesterday's DETERMINED ten letter game  (Read 950 times)

Jacki

  • Cryptoverbalist
  • *
  • Posts: 964
    • View Profile
DENDRITE common in yesterday's DETERMINED ten letter game
« on: December 07, 2020, 08:11:58 PM »
DENDRITE - for a start when I press on the meaning it says cytology in brackets - hardly a popular topic. If this is a common word then I'm going to the wrong bars!!
Late blooming azaleas tricked by the warmer weather into flowering

les303

  • Cryptoverbalist
  • *
  • Posts: 704
  • Never give up just keep on trying
    • View Profile
Re: DENDRITE common in yesterday's DETERMINED ten letter game
« Reply #1 on: December 07, 2020, 10:33:09 PM »
I agree with you Jacki & hopefully Alan will make this end rite.

birdy

  • Eulexic
  • ***
  • Posts: 3370
  • Brooklyn, NY
    • View Profile
Re: DENDRITE common in yesterday's DETERMINED ten letter game
« Reply #2 on: December 14, 2020, 07:42:14 AM »
I don't know that I would think of it as common, but I am familiar with the word both in nervous system structure context, and as part of a description meaning branching.

Alan W

  • Administrator
  • Eulexic
  • *****
  • Posts: 4961
  • Melbourne, Australia
    • View Profile
    • Email
Re: DENDRITE common in yesterday's DETERMINED ten letter game
« Reply #3 on: December 17, 2020, 01:09:09 PM »
I agree this is a fairly technical word. The vast majority of occurrences in the News on the Web corpus are in scientific journals. The New York Times index has only 10 occurrences in the past 5 years. Not all of these are related to nerve cells - a couple are about snow. For example:

Quote
Don’t assume you’ll see the archetypal, branching-star type called stellar dendrites, which require temperatures around minus 15 degrees Celsius.

The word origin is from the Greek for tree. Wiktionary says one meaning is a hermit living in a tree, but I didn't spot any examples of that sense.

Dendrite will be treated as a rare word in future.
Alan Walker
Creator of Lexigame websites

Jacki

  • Cryptoverbalist
  • *
  • Posts: 964
    • View Profile
Re: DENDRITE common in yesterday's DETERMINED ten letter game
« Reply #4 on: December 17, 2020, 10:25:17 PM »
Good call Alan, although I must admit I have Les's words about you making it end rite in my head forever! So at least I've learnt a new word.
Late blooming azaleas tricked by the warmer weather into flowering

rogue_mother

  • Eulexic
  • ***
  • Posts: 2164
  • I CAN'T BREATHE!
    • View Profile
Re: DENDRITE common in yesterday's DETERMINED ten letter game
« Reply #5 on: December 18, 2020, 09:27:50 AM »
While I understand the reclassification of dendrite, it nonetheless saddens me from a philosophical standpoint whenever another science-based word gets reclassified to less common. It just seems to me that some scientific knowledge should be required for a person to be reasonably well read. I have not taken any science courses since high school except for some mechanics and electricity (and those only to get my university degree, never used in the course of my working life), but I read science based articles every week in my local newspaper and over the years in magazines such as National Geographic. Very few of the "science" words reclassified over the years have been unfamiliar to me. This seems not to be the case with most Chihuahua players, and it strikes me as unfortunate.
Inside the Beltway, Washington, DC metropolitan area

birdy

  • Eulexic
  • ***
  • Posts: 3370
  • Brooklyn, NY
    • View Profile
Re: DENDRITE common in yesterday's DETERMINED ten letter game
« Reply #6 on: December 21, 2020, 10:29:37 AM »
rogue_mother, I think that fear of science might be right up there with fear of mathematics in people's minds, unfortunately.

I liked animals but was not much good at my minor, zoology (which is why it was not my major), but that was basically the only science I studied after high school. I think most of my knowledge of scientific words is either from reading articles as you do, or from reading a lot of science fiction over the years, along with my interest in birds and plants. I don't necessarily know the proper definition of the word (e.g., "parsec" to me just means a heck of a long way), but at least I vaguely know what field it's related to.