Rhizome
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A horizontal, underground stem of some plants that sends out roots and shoots (scions) from its nodes.
"All these species are climbing, briery plants, having long slender roots, which proceed in all directions from a common rootstalk or rhizome."
- 2 a horizontal plant stem with shoots above and roots below serving as a reproductive structure wordnet
- 3 A so-called “image of thought” that apprehends multiplicities.
"The corpus of Kafka's writing, they argue, is ‘a rhizome, a burrow’ (K 7)—an uncentered and meandering growth like crab grass, a complex, aleatory network of pathways like a rabbit warren. A rhizome, as Deleuze and Guattari explain in Rhizome: an Introduction (1976), is the antithesis of a root-tree structure, or ‘arborescence’, the structural model which has dominated Western thought from Porphyrian trees, to Linnaean taxonomies, to Chomskyan sentence diagrams."
Example
More examples"All these species are climbing, briery plants, having long slender roots, which proceed in all directions from a common rootstalk or rhizome."
Etymology
Borrowed from Ancient Greek ῥίζωμα (rhízōma). As philosophical metaphor, used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.