[tree] 
noun, verb, treed, tree⋅ing.| 1. | a plant having a permanently woody main stem or trunk, ordinarily growing to a considerable height, and usually developing branches at some distance from the ground. |
| 2. | any of various shrubs, bushes, and plants, as the banana, resembling a tree in form and size. |
| 3. | something resembling a tree in shape, as a clothes tree or a crosstree. |
| 4. | Mathematics, Linguistics. tree diagram. |
| 5. | family tree. |
| 6. | a pole, post, beam, bar, handle, or the like, as one forming part of some structure. |
| 7. | a shoetree or boot tree. |
| 8. | a saddletree. |
| 9. | a treelike group of crystals, as one forming in an electrolytic cell. |
| 10. | a gallows or gibbet. |
| 11. | the cross on which Christ was crucified. |
| 12. | Computers. a data structure organized like a tree whose nodes store data elements and whose branches represent pointers to other nodes in the tree. |
| 13. | Christmas tree. |
| 14. | to drive into or up a tree, as a pursued animal or person. |
| 15. | Informal. to put into a difficult position. |
| 16. | to stretch or shape on a tree, as a boot. |
| 17. | to furnish (a structure) with a tree. |
| 18. | up a tree, Informal. in a difficult or embarrassing situation; at a loss; stumped. |
[tree] | Sir Herbert Beer⋅bohm [beer-bohm] , (Herbert Beerbohm), 1853–1917, English actor and theater manager; brother of Max Beerbohm. |
| Mathematics, Linguistics. a diagram in which lines branch out from a central point or stem without forming any closed loops. |
| tree (trē) n.
[Middle English, from Old English trēow; see deru- in Indo-European roots.] tree'less adj. |
| Tree (trē) British actor and producer who founded the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (1904). |
tree
|
"Minc'd Pyes do not grow upon every tree,
But search the Ovens for them, and there they be."
["Poor Robin," Almanack, 1669]
| tree (trē) Pronunciation Key
Any of a wide variety of perennial plants typically having a single woody stem, and usually branches and leaves. Many species of both gymnosperms (notably the conifers) and angiosperms grow in the form of trees. The ancient forests of the Devonian, Mississippian, and Pennsylvanian periods of the Paleozoic Era were dominated by trees belonging to groups of seedless plants such as the lycophytes. The strength and height of trees are made possible by the supportive conductive tissue known as vascular tissue. |
tree mathematics, data
A directed acyclic graph; i.e. a graph wherein there is only one route between any pair of nodes, and there is a notion of "toward top of the tree" (i.e. the root node), and its opposite direction, toward the leaves. A tree with n nodes has n-1 edges.
Although maybe not part of the widest definition of a tree, a common constraint is that no node can have more than one parent. Moreover, for some applications, it is necessary to consider a node's daughter nodes to be an ordered list, instead of merely a set.
As a data structure in computer programs, trees are used in everything from B-trees in databases and file systems, to game trees in game theory, to syntax trees in a human or computer languages.
(1998-11-12)
tree
see bark up the wrong tree; can't see the forest for the trees; talk someone's arm off (the bark off a tree); up a tree.