dissect
Americanverb (used with object)
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dissects,
present (3rd person singular)
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dissected,
past participle, past
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dissecting
present participle
verb
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to cut open and examine the structure of (a dead animal or plant)
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(tr) to examine critically and minutely
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To cut apart or separate body tissues or organs, especially for anatomical study.
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In surgery, to separate different anatomical structures along natural lines by dividing the connective tissue framework.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
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dissectionnoun
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dissectornoun
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redissectverb (used with object)
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dissectibleadjective
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self-dissectingadjective
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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dissectsimple
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dissectssimple
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have dissectedperfect
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has dissectedperfect
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am dissectingprogressive
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are dissectingprogressive
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is dissectingprogressive
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have been dissectingperfect progressive
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has been dissectingperfect progressive
Past
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dissectedsimple
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had dissectedperfect
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was dissectingprogressive
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were dissectingprogressive
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had been dissectingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of dissect
1600–10; < Latin dissectus (past participle of dissecāre to cut up), equivalent to dis- dis- 1 + sec- cut + -tus past participle suffix
Explanation
When you dissect a frog in science class, you cut it open to look at its inner organs. To dissect is to break something down to look at its parts. Dissecting something allows you to look at it closely and understand it better. If your soccer team loses a match, you might want to dissect the game afterward to try to find exactly how and when things went wrong. Television analysts will often dissect a political speech to understand what was really being said, how true the statements were, and how well it was done.
Vocabulary lists containing dissect
"Fine?" Vocabulary from the short story
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Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
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Thirteen Reasons Why
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Some are by amateur forensic analysts and would-be internet sleuths with podcast names like The Murder Men that dissect the killing as if it’s a 1980s cold case.
From Slate ● Jul. 21, 2026
Voters, he said, don’t dissect candidates’ identities and attributes the way political professionals do.
From Salon ● Jul. 13, 2026
One is that the market is slow to react to pure news that has “high quantitative intensity” — articles that dissect a company’s income or balance sheet, for example.
From MarketWatch ● Jul. 4, 2026
And it’s Henry who’s the star of this outfit, almost always the first to dissect whatever just happened.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 23, 2026
Yet as weird as these singularities behave, they were no longer mysterious to mathematicians, who were learning to dissect the infinite.
From "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife
She dissects those feelings of inadequacy with pitch-black humour on In My Room.
From BBC ● Apr. 28, 2026
Its current season dissects “An American Tragedy,” which I haven’t read.
From Salon ● Apr. 2, 2026
Jewelry historian Marion Fasel dissects famous diamond engagement rings, including a late 1400s Renaissance point-cut ring and the 2014 cushion-cut ring Dwyane Wade gave Gabrielle Union.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 28, 2025
Like any kind of fandom, HahaYes dissects each and every seemingly meaningless Musk tweet, searching desperately for hidden meaning to a point of near-delusion.
From Slate ● Sep. 26, 2025
Not that she dissects and ponders the dusty mechanical bits of her miserable life’s curse.
From "Grendel" by John Gardner
Somewhere in Tau’s servers, hours of video footage may be getting dissected frame by frame, annotated and then used to train more capable robots.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 16, 2026
That became evident only after the animals were dissected and genetically analysed in the field laboratory.
From Science Daily ● Sep. 24, 2026
They dissected Laura Owens’s claim that she was carrying Echard’s twins and grew suspicious when a photo surfaced of her at a horse show with no apparent baby bump.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 16, 2026
Recalling the model airplane sets he assembled as a child, he arranged a fish, a chicken and a duck as a collection of dissected parts on a tabletop, labeling it with instructions for reconstruction.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 3, 2026
She dissected a frog and raised its eggs, recording each stage.
From "The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merian's Art Changed Science" by Joyce Sidman
As Levine was dissecting the painting, an associate professor of Spanish historical linguistics at Utrecht University named Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen was researching her family tree.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 26, 2026
In a four-star review, external, the Times noted how Heaton's "casually funny" and "deceptively piercing" latest album "again confirms his gift for dissecting human weakness with an unsentimental but humane eye".
From BBC ● Aug. 28, 2026
Before dissecting a scene, Dalton studies the character within the story.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 6, 2026
"By dissecting which immune cells are involved and how they coordinate the response, we're offering vaccine developers some additional mechanistic insights to consider in their goal of optimizing these vaccines against tumor proteins."
From Science Daily ● Jul. 9, 2026
It was like trying to read someone’s mind by dissecting their cerebral cortex.
From "Scythe" by Neal Shusterman
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
