rhizome means A horizontal, underground stem of some plants that sends out roots and shoots (scions) from its nodes.
rhizome is pronounced /ˈɹaɪzoʊm/.
Why “rhizome” is a great word
A horizontal, usually underground stem that sends out roots and shoots from its nodes, or a metaphor for a non-hierarchical, interconnected system of thought. From the Ancient Greek ῥίζωμα (rhízōma, "mass of roots"), the term was adopted as a philosophical metaphor in the 20th century by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Unlike a "root," which descends vertically to anchor and absorb, or a "hierarchy," which ascends in ranked, branching order, the rhizome proliferates laterally in a decentralized, acentered network. It is the ginger knot in your kitchen cupboard sprouting a green finger, the relentless subterranean weave of couch grass defying the gardener's border, and the invisible fungal mycelium gossiping between trees in a forest—a quiet model for how life, and thought, truly spreads: not by tracing a single lineage, but by mapping an endless, horizontal connection.
Etymology
Borrowed from Ancient Greek ῥίζωμα (rhízōma). As philosophical metaphor, used by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
noun
- A horizontal, underground stem of some plants that sends out roots and shoots (scions) from its nodes.“All these species are climbing, briery plants, having long slender roots, which proceed in all directions from a common rootstalk or rhizome.”
- A so-called “image of thought” that apprehends multiplicities.“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 Porphyr”
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.
- tendril 80% match — A thin, spirally coiling stem that attaches a plant to its support. vs rhizome →
- mycelium 80% match — The vegetative part of any fungus, consisting of a mass of branching, threadlike hyphae, often underground. vs rhizome →
- burgeon 78% match — A bud, sprout, or shoot. vs rhizome →
- metaphor 78% match — The use of a word, phrase, concept, or set of concepts to refer to something other than its literal meaning, invoking an implicit similarity between the thing described and what is denoted by the word, etc., that is used. vs rhizome →
- deracine 78% match — Having been uprooted. vs rhizome →
- rootstock 78% match — A healthy and vigorous-rooted plant that is used in grafting, most commonly as a sound base to support a scion that bears desirable fruit in orchard culture. vs rhizome →
- metastasis 78% match — A change in nature, form, or quality. vs rhizome →
- deracinate 77% match — To pull up by the roots; to uproot; to extirpate. vs rhizome →