Other forms: branches, branched, branching
A branch is one of the wooden arms growing out of a tree. The one you hang the swing from, the one that scrapes the roof of the car in a narrow lane, the one that comes down across the road in a storm.
From there the word spreads the way the tree does. A bank or a chain of shops has branches — one local office of a much bigger thing, and the nearest branch shuts at five. A railway line has a branch, a family has branches, and physics is a branch of science. It works as a verb as well: the path branches just past the bridge, and to branch out is to start doing something you have not done before. Watch the of — a branch of the bank, a branch of medicine — and remember that a branch is never the trunk.
1nounbranchA woody arm growing out of the trunk of a tree.~21%
“A branch came down across the drive in the night.”
2nounofficeOne local office or shop belonging to a much larger company.~10%
“The bank closed its village branch in March.”
3noundivisionOne part of a larger subject, family or organisation.~67%
“Physics is a branch of science.”
4verbdivideTo divide into two or more directions.~2%
“The road branches left towards the coast.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 173 sentences found in the wild and placed 153 of them on a sense (20 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
BRANCH → a BUNCH
A bunch of keys hangs from every arm of the old tree outside the bank, and when the wind gets up the whole street can hear the tree ring.
hooks ontobunch
The Latin behind it is branca, a footprint, and later a paw or a claw. Old French passed it on as branche, and the picture holds up: a bare tree in winter is a handful of claws against the sky. Where Latin found the word, nobody knows.
Proto-Indo-European
*wrónk-eh₂
cel-gau
*vranca
Latin
branca — footprint”, later also “paw, claw
Old French
branche
Middle English
branche
English, today
branch
Built from
From Middle English branche, braunche, bronche, from Old French branche, branke, from Latin branca (“footprint”, later also “paw, claw”) (whence Middle High German pranke, German Pranke (“paw”)), of unknown origin. Perhaps of cel - origin, from a hypothetical cel-gau vranca, from Proto-Indo-European wrónk-eh₂. If so, then Indo-European cognates include Old Norse rá, vró (“angle, corner”), and possibly Lithuanian rankà (“hand”), cu рѫка (“hand”), Albanian rangë (“yardwork”). The verb is from Middle English braunchen, from the noun.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA