branches

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of branch.

   Heavy snow snapped several branches off the pine overnight.

   The bank closed three of its smaller branches last year.

   Note

   One spelling serves every kind of branch: the limbs of a tree, the offices of a bank, the lines of a family, and, in the Southern US, the creeks that feed a larger river. Mathematicians also speak of the branches of a curve, the arms that run out without end. Because branch ends in -ch, the plural takes -es and gains a syllable.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of branch.

   The trail branches sharply where the forest thins out.

   Her research branches into questions no one had asked before.

   Note

   Usually a verb without an object: a road branches, a tree branches, and a program branches to another instruction when a condition is met. With an object it can run the other way: whoever branches a felled tree strips off its limbs. In colloquial union talk, a member is branched when disciplined at a branch meeting. The -es ending works as it does in the plural noun.

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