underroot

English

Etymology 1

From Middle English underwroten, equivalent to under- +‎ root.

Adjective

underroot (not comparable)

1. Beneath the roots.
   • 1936, Proceedings, page 62:

     Capillary saturated soil layers in relation to water expenditure are to be divided into three parts: 1) the part above the roots, 2) sucking part-active root part and 3) underroot part.

   • 1996, Communicated Abstracts, page 569:

     In the ores of Fayzabad region (Central Tajikistan) the crystals of fluorite are only of octohedrial habitus types and it proves that the crystals here represent underroot parts ( according to the scheme of changing the forms of crystals).

   • 2024, Fred Perry, Gold Digger Omnibus #10:

     The underroot tendril! We are at fault for giving the invader a path to Lady Brianna.

Adverb

underroot (comparative more underroot, superlative most underroot)

1. Beneath the roots.
   • 1998, Hannah Rachel Bell, Men's Business, Women's Business:

     It is a rain forest and mucky underroot place where hard land is scarce.

   • 2009, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Julian the Magician, page 70:

     His own bloodveins stretched for the riverroots which...; all held silent communion; all were part of; all tapped the latent elements of seed and death undertree, underroot.

   • 2011, Roberto Piazza, Soft Matter: The stuff that dreams are made of, page 130:

     I already hinted at the problem of sea eutrophication (where excess nutrients cause algae to flourish) due to the phosphates that used to be added to washing powder, and, surely, it is not pleasant for plants to find underfoot (or, better, "underroot") those surfactants we use daily at home (please, never pour your dishwater on the roots of a magnificent camellia, even if it is blooming in the garden of a next-door neighbor you cannot stand).

Noun

underroot (plural underroots)

1. The underground root portion of a plant, or a single underground root.
   • 1952, Northern Nut Grower's Association, Annual Report of the Northern Nut Growers Association, page 37:

     To my knowledge, this is the only tree, having a Manregian underroot, that has shown blackline.

   • 1972, Roads and Streets - Volume 115, page 56:

     During December limbs and growth in the crown were pruned and an area around the base of the trunk was mulched to help keep the direct underroots frost-free.

   • 1992, Dale T. Lindgren, ‎Betty Davenport, List and Description of Named Cultivars in the Genus Penstemon, page 36:

     The flower stalk has good substance, foliage very similar to P. superbus, rosette has side shoots coming from underroots.

   • 1997, Evans Lansing Smith, Figuring Poesis: A Mythical Geometry of Postmodernism, page 108:

     The old man appears in this scene very much like the wise Wotan of Norse myth, who won his wisdom from Mimir's well in the tangled underroots of the World Tree Yggdrasil .

2. (figurative) An underlying root or basis
   • 1858, Samuel Fuller, Loutron: Or, Water Baptism, page 19:

     The word Bapt cannot here, any more than elsewhere, explain itself, There is nothing back of it. It has no underroot.

   • 1993, American Flint Glass Workers' Union, Proceedings of the Ninety-Ninth International Convention, page 60:

     It has deep underroots.

   • 2012, Martha Wells, The Siren Depths:

     But did they check the underroots?” Dash asked, absently looping an arm around Frost and letting her settle in his lap, though his attention was still on the platform. His scaly brow knit in worry. "It doesn't look stable to me."

Verb

underroot (third-person singular simple present underroots, present participle underrooting, simple past and past participle underrooted)

1. (transitive) to dig or burrow beneath, especially beneath the roots of; (by extension) to undermine

Etymology 2

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

Noun

underroot (plural underroots)

1. (India) Square root.
   • 1981, Paruchuri R. Krishnaiah, A Hand Book of Statistics - Volume 1, page 298:

     The underroot of the product of two regression coefficients gives us the coefficient of correlation .

   • 2008, Tulsian P.C. & Jhunjhunwala Bharat, Business Statistics, pages 7-32:

     To take the underroot of (2c-n)/n, the negative (2c-n)/n is multiplied with the minus sign to make it positive since one cannot take the underroot of minus item.

   • 2020, Gulshan Shrivastava, ‎ Sheng-Lung Peng, ‎ Himani Bansal, New Age Analytics: Transforming the Internet through Machine Learning, page 193:

     The Euclidian distance uses the under-root of the squared sum of the difference between individual ratings of the two samples whose similarity we want to find.