rhizome

English

Alternative forms

• rhizoma

Etymology

From rhiz- +‎ -ome. As philosophical metaphor, used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈɹaɪzoʊm/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

Noun

rhizome (plural rhizomes)

1. (botany) A horizontal, underground stem of some plants that sends out roots and shoots (scions) from its nodes.

   Synonyms: race, rootstalk

   • 1868, George Bacon Wood, A Treatise on Therapeutics, and Pharmacology, Or Materia Medica, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Company, page 432:

     All these species are climbing, briery plants, having long slender roots, which proceed in all directions from a common rootstalk or rhizome.

2. (philosophy, critical theory) A so-called “image of thought” that apprehends multiplicities.
   • 1989, Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, Psychology Press, →ISBN, page 107:

     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.

   • 2008, A. Hess, “Reconsidering the Rhizome”, in Amanda Spink, Michael Zimmer, editors, Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Springer Science & Business Media, →ISBN, page 35:

     Critical theorists have often drawn from Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the rhizome when discussing the potential of the Internet. While the Internet may structurally appear as a rhizome, its day-to-day usage by millions via search engines precludes experiencing the random interconnectedness and potential democratizing function.

Derived terms

• rhizomatic
• rhizomatous

Related terms

• licorice

Translations

horizontal underground stem of some plants

• Azerbaijani: kökümsov
• Bulgarian: коренище n (korenište)
• Catalan: rizoma (ca) m
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 根莖／根茎 (zh) (gēnjīng)

• Czech: oddenek (cs) m
• Dutch: wortelstok (nl) m, rizoom (nl) n
• Esperanto: rizomo
• Finnish: maavarsi (fi), vaakajuurakko
• French: rhizome (fr) m
• Georgian: ფესურა (pesura)
• German: Rhizom (de) n, Wurzelstock (de) m
• Greek: ρίζωμα (el) n (rízoma)
• Hawaiian: ʻauaʻa
• Hungarian: rizóma (hu)
• Ido: rizomo (io)
• Indonesian: rimpang (id)
• Italian: rizoma (it) m
• Japanese: 根茎 (ja) (こんけい, konkei)
• Khmer: មើម (km) (məəm)
• Korean: 땅속줄기 (ko) (ttangsokjulgi)
• Malay: rizom
• Maori: akakōare, akakōareare
• Norwegian: jordstengel m, rhizom n, rotstokk m
• Persian: ریزوم (fa) (rizom)
• Polish: kłącze (pl) n
• Portuguese: rizoma (pt) m
• Russian: корневи́ще (ru) n (kornevíšče)
• Spanish: rizoma (es) m
• Swedish: jordstam (sv) c, rhizom (sv) c, rotstock (sv) c
• Tagalog: ayuyang
• Tibetan: རམ་རྩ་ (ram rtsa), རྩི་ཤིང་གི་ལྦ་རྩ་ (rtsi shing gi lba rtsa)
• Ukrainian: кореневище (uk) n (korenevyšče)
• Welsh: gwreiddgoesyn m, rhisom m

image of thought

• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 根莖／根茎 (zh) (gēnjīng)

• Finnish: rihmasto (fi)
• Spanish: please add this translation if you can

Further reading

• rhizome on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• rhizome (philosophy) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

French

Pronunciation

• Audio:

  (file)

Noun

rhizome m (plural rhizomes)

1. (botany) rhizome

Further reading

• “rhizome”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.