tree

noun

1. A perennial woody plant taller and larger than a shrub with a wooden trunk and, at some distance from the ground, having leaves and branches.

   “Hyperion is the tallest living tree in the world.”

   “Birds have a nest in a tree in the garden.”

   “B. Wooster: Of all the places on this great planet of ours, West Neck, Long Island, has chosen to be the most unexciting. The last time anything remotely interesting happened here was in 1842, when a tree fell over. They still talk about it in the village.”

   “When we see a train trapped behind (or embedded in) a fallen tree our first thought should be 'what was it doing there anyway?' […]Trees are also responsible for numerous minor delays in autumn [due to leaves falling on the track], which rolling stock engineers are supposed to cope with as usual.”

2. Any other plant (such as a large shrub or herb) that is reminiscent of the above in form and size.

   “The banana tree is a tall perennial herb: its trunk is not woody.”

3. An object made from a tree trunk and having multiple hooks or storage platforms.

   “He had the choice of buying a scratching post or a cat tree.”

4. A device used to hold or stretch a shoe open.

   “He put a shoe tree in each of his shoes.”

5. The structural frame of a saddle.
6. A connected graph with no cycles or, if the graph is finite, equivalently a connected graph with n vertices and n−1 edges.
7. A recursive data structure in which each node has zero or more nodes as children, but does not share children with other nodes.
8. A display or listing of entries or elements such that there are primary and secondary entries shown, usually linked by drawn lines or by indenting to the right.

   “We’ll show it as a tree list.”

9. Any structure or construct having branches representing divergence or possible choices.

   “family tree; skill tree”

10. The structure or wooden frame used in the construction of a saddle used in horse riding.
11. (in-plural, often, slang)Marijuana.

    “I like good pussy and I like good trees / Smoke so much weed you wouldn't believe”

    “Everyday man's on the block / Smoke trees (ah)”

    “Whiskey with the team, got it bubblin' / I got trees in my luggage, I got tings out in London / Hope UK, what you say? Fuck is you sayin'?”

12. A cross or gallows.

    “Tyburn tree”

    “The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree.”

    “Ste[phano]. Trinculo, keepe a good tongue in your head: If you proue a mutineere, the next Tree:[…]”

    “Was it for Crimes that I had done / He groan’d upon the Tree?”

    “When Jesus died on that tree, he bore the awful curse of the law for us so that we might be saved.”

13. A mass of crystals, aggregated in arborescent forms, obtained by precipitation of a metal from solution.
14. The fifth Lenormand card.
15. (alt-of, uncountable)Alternative letter-case form of TREE.
16. (uncountable)An extremely fast-growing function based on Kruskal's tree theorem.
17. (alt-of, uncountable)Alternative letter-case form of TREE.

verb

1. (transitive)To chase (an animal or person) up a tree.

   “The dog treed the cat.”

   “When hunted it [the jaguar] takes refuge in trees, and this habit is well known to hunters, who pursue it with dogs and pot it when treed.”

   “"And our dogs used to tree the cats on our property here, and we'd dispatch them."”

2. (transitive)To place in a tree.

   “Black bears can tree their cubs for protection, but grizzly bears cannot.”

3. (transitive)To place upon a shoe tree; to fit with a shoe tree; to stretch upon a shoe tree.

   “to tree a boot”

   “Two suits and an overcoat hung in the closet over three pairs of carefully treed shoes.”

4. (intransitive)To take refuge in a tree.

name

1. A surname.