Treeness
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The essence of what it means to be a tree; the qualities that make a tree what it is. nonce-word, uncountable
"A tree may, for the imagination, present forcibly one of its qualities at a time; it may be a green dome of shade on a hot day, a ladder of retreat for a man from the attentions of a mad bull, a peg on which an apple hangs, a screen for an assassin, a choir for birds; and its own business of spreading out its million pores to the air and propagating its kind, which comes nearest to being its “treeness,” may be what occupies the artist least and bores him most."
- 2 The suitability of an evolutionary tree for representing the structure of a population; the degree to which a population structure can be accurately described as a tree of descent, with different branches evolving independently after they split. uncountable
"If factors that contribute to a tree-like pattern of the variance–covariance matrix dominate the evolutionary picture over those that tend to destroy it, one can expect treeness to be reasonably high. Only if this is true, reconstruction of the evolutionary process by tree analysis and a tree representation for descriptive purposes can be useful."
- 3 The condition of being a tree; acyclicity and connectedness. uncountable
"…such a tree can be built up incrementally by adding the shortest edge not yet explored, which also maintains treeness (acyclicity)."
Example
More examples"A tree may, for the imagination, present forcibly one of its qualities at a time; it may be a green dome of shade on a hot day, a ladder of retreat for a man from the attentions of a mad bull, a peg on which an apple hangs, a screen for an assassin, a choir for birds; and its own business of spreading out its million pores to the air and propagating its kind, which comes nearest to being its “treeness,” may be what occupies the artist least and bores him most."
Etymology
From tree + -ness.
More for "treeness"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.