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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
dissect
verb
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ The book dissects historical data to show how Napoleon ran his army.
▪ The specimens were carefully dissected and examined under a microscope.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ But it is possible to dissect most crises and examine each component in turn.
▪ He would rather dissect human emotions at the most personal level.
▪ It remained the chief subject of the editorial pages, dissected and analyzed ceaselessly.
▪ Newspaper headlines, radio talk shows and magazine pieces dissected its operations.
▪ These fan deposits extend into the mountain valleys and have been dissected into terraces by occasional floods emerging from those valleys.
▪ Tiger's game should not be dissected, merely admired.
▪ You kind of dissect it and write grammar stuff.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Dissect

Dissect \Dis*sect"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Dissected; p. pr. & vb. n. Dissecting.] [L. dissectus, p. p. of dissecare; dis- + secare to cut. See Section.]

  1. (Anat.) To divide into separate parts; to cut in pieces; to separate and expose the parts of, as an animal or a plant, for examination and to show their structure and relations; to anatomize.

  2. To analyze, for the purposes of science or criticism; to divide and examine minutely.

    This paragraph . . . I have dissected for a sample.
    --Atterbury.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
dissect

c.1600, from Latin dissectus, past participle of dissecare "to cut to pieces" (see dissection). Or perhaps a back-formation from dissection. Related: Dissected; dissecting.

Wiktionary
dissect

vb. 1 (context transitive English) To study an animal's anatomy by cutting it apart; to perform a necropsy or an autopsy. 2 (context transitive English) To study a plant or other organism's anatomy similarly. 3 (context transitive English) To analyze an idea in detail by separating it into its parts. 4 (context transitive anatomy surgery English) To separate muscles, organs, and so on without cutting into them or disrupting their architecture. 5 (context transitive pathology English) Of an infection or foreign material, following the fascia separating muscles or other organs.

WordNet
dissect
  1. v. cut open or cut apart; "dissect the bodies for analysis"

  2. make a mathematical, chemical, or grammatical analysis of; break down into components or essential features; "analyze a specimen"; "analyze a sentence"; "analyze a chemical compound" [syn: analyze, analyse, break down, take apart] [ant: synthesize]

Wikipedia
Dissect

Usage examples of "dissect".

Strippers and analyzers were busily at work on the fringes of the beam, dissecting out, isolating, and identifying each of the many scraps of extraneous thought accompanying the main beam.

In the next chapter I ask you simply to come with me through a day in the life of the lab as I go through the routine tasks of experimentation, training chicks, dissecting their brains, measuring their biochemical constituents in quantities of thousandths of a milligram, and trying to extract meaning from the tables of figures that these measurements produce.

Pat to train the chicks, dissect and code the brain samples, and send them down to me at Imperial to do the biochemical analyses, blind as to which samples came from which condition.

I have others catching and dissecting flies, accumulating remarkable pebbles, cockleshells, etc.

Ngata spent it happily examining his specimens, dissecting those of which he had duplicates and getting blood up to his elbows, and explaining to anyone who would listen that this one was probably a rhynocephalian, while that one was more likely an eosuchian, like those ancestral to the dinosaurs.

It appears as if the entire cauda equina has been dissected out, starting at L1 and terminating at the sacrum.

Divines of all sorts, and physicians, Philosophers, mathematicians: The Galenist and Paracelsian 475 Condemn the way each other deals in: Anatomists dissect and mangle, To cut themselves out work to wrangle Astrologers dispute their dreams, That in their sleeps they talk of schemes: 480 And heralds stickle, who got who So many hundred years ago.

All of them had spent hundreds of hours dissecting cadavers, and could distinguish at a glance between the ligament of Hesselbach and the ligament of Treitz, but none of them had had a single hour of instruction in cross-cultural medicine.

John Pleydell spoke with that cynical frankness which seems often to follow upon a few years devoted to practice at the Common Law Bar, where men in truth spend their days in dissecting the mental diseases of their fellow creatures, and learn to conclude that a pure and healthy mind is possessed by none.

Taking one of the flowers from the bunch, Asenath, as they slowly walked forward, proceeded to dissect it, explained the mysteries of stamens and pistils, pollen, petals, and calyx, and, by the time they had reached the village, had succeeded in giving him a general idea of the Linnaean system of classification.

INTO LEVEL 3 1989 NOVEMBER 13, MONDAY BY MONDAY MORNING-the day after he dissected Monkey O53-Dan Dalgard had decided to bring the problem with his monkeys to the attention of USAMRIID, at Fort Detrick.

Those cadavers which have been dissected have not been especially informative, though I am told preliminary examinations suggest that their neuromuscular systemology is unusually dense for a mammalian life-form.

He quickly dissected the clavicles and the pectoralis muscle group free from the chest wall.

I have already hinted, in my account of the reductive steps the group employed, that a variety of experimentally or theoretically inconvenient processes that also occurred during the behaviour, such as a contribution of the peripheral nervous system, and some of the polysynaptic inputs onto the motor neuron, were dissected away and no longer taken into consideration.

Hart dissected the stomach of a woman of thirty which resembled the stomach of a predaceous bird, with patches of tendon on its surface.