Definition of "ramify" [ram•i•fy]

• To have complicating consequences or outgrowths: The problem merely ramified after the unsuccessful meeting. (verb-intransitive)
• To send out branches or subordinate branchlike parts. (verb-intransitive)
• To divide into or cause to extend in branches or subordinate branchlike parts. (verb-transitive)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The word ramify has appeared in one Times article over the past year and only four times in the past five years, most recently in the July 11, 2010 Sunday Magazine cover article by Robert F."
• "Slide 8: The Ramage or Conical Clan • Internally ranked, or hierarchical, social organization • Tendency to "ramify," that is subordinate lineages split off main group to found new communities • Over time this process results in long-distance - island-hopping - migrations that resulted in peopling of Polynesia by Austronesian-speaking peoples"
• "Sitting in a studio flat in Warren Street with the windows shut, I began to recall how sound would ramify around my uncle's house in south Calcutta, always suggesting an elsewhere; around this time, I became aware that the soundtracks in Satyajit Ray's and Jean Renoir's films were as intent on capturing this elsewhere as they were in attending to the main story."