dissect

To study an animal's anatomy by cutting it apart; to perform a necropsy or an autopsy.

Verb

To study an animal's anatomy by cutting it apart; to perform a necropsy or an autopsy.
- She was the first person in her class to properly dissect the sheep heart. - 2020, Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half, Dialogue Books, page 130:
To study a plant's or other organism's anatomy similarly.
To analyze an idea in detail by delineating between its parts.
To decontextualize an idea, especially through overanalysis by delineating between its parts too strongly based on style, usually involving pedantry, at the expense of substance.
- Academics tend to take Indigenous oral histories out of their contexts and dissect them according to Western disciplinary objectives and foci (see figure 1). - 2000, Winona Lu-Ann Stevenson, Decolonizing Tribal...
- By focusing excessively on dissecting the text into 'forms' and exploring their supposed evolution, form criticism overlooks the larger literary and historical context within which these forms exist. - 2023 July 16,...
- There should be a more holistic approach both to behavior and to inner experience. Köhler (1929), in the first edition of his Gestalt psychology book, made a similar parallel. Both classical psychology and behaviorism...
Synonyms: contextomize
To separate muscles, organs, etc. without cutting into them or disrupting their architecture.
- Now dissect the triceps away from its attachment on the humerus.
Of an infection or foreign material, following the fascia separating muscles or other organs.

Borrowed from Latin dissectus past participle of dissecare (“to cut asunder, cut up”), from dis- (“asunder”) + secare (“to cut”); see section.