Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In church arch., the place where the transept meets the nave and choir, this space often being covered by a tower or cupola; the cross.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun medicine An interstitial space within a tissue or organ.
  • noun medicine Specifically the tissue between the pulmonary alveoli and the bloodstream.
  • noun philosophy A state between systems or spaces.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin interstitium, from inter ("between") + sistere ("to stand, place").

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Examples

  • Et fuit, quum retraheret manum suam, ecce, egressus est frater ejus, et dixit, Cur rupisti super to interstitium?

    Commentary on Genesis - Volume 2 1509-1564 1996

  • Et dedit in manum servorum suorum, singulos greges seorsum: dixitque ad servos suos, Transite ante me, et interstitium ponetis inter gregem et gregem.

    Commentary on Genesis - Volume 2 1509-1564 1996

  • A Style in Treason CHAPTER ONE The Karas, a fragile transship-she was really little more than a ferry, just barely meriting a name-came fluttering out of the interstitium. into the Flos Campi system a day late in a ball of rainbows, trailing behind her two gaudy contrails of false photons, like a moth unable to free herself of her cocoon.

    Anywhen Blish, James 1970

  • Spenser ‘zephyrus’, and not ‘zephyr’; so ‘interstitium’ (Fuller) preceded ‘interstice’; ‘philtrum’ (Culverwell) ‘philtre’; ‘expansum’

    English Past and Present Richard Chenevix Trench 1846

  • I suppose, without much more difficulty be yielded, seeing that we may observe a very great _interstitium_ of Air betwixt the Object, and the Eye, makes it appear of a dead blew, far enough differing from a red, or yellow.

    Micrographia Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon Robert Hooke 1669

  • Individual cells expressing CD24 were identified in the interstitium of later gestation and postnatal kidneys.

    Naturejobs - All Jobs Larissa Ivanova 2010

  • Rheumatoid lung is a disease of the tissue which makes up the walls of the alveoli, known as the interstitium.

    Home | Mail Online 2010

  • Pulmonary LAM is a rare but serious lung disease that occurs when smooth muscle tissue proliferates within the interstitium of the lung in the form of characteristic thin-walled lung cysts.

    Newswise: Latest News 2010

  • The deposits strongly stained for Congo red and, in most cases, had distinctive morphological features with diffuse involvement of the interstitium, arteries, and glomeruli.

    Naturejobs - All Jobs Christopher P Larsen 2010

  • Muscle tissue is composed of multinucleate myofibers surrounded by a basal lamina (extra-cellular matrix), which delineate the fibers from the interstitium consisting of vessels and connective tissue

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Ara Parlakian et al. 2010

  • We now have a shared language, or at least a word, for this system — or this organ, or this infrastructure (depending on whom you ask) — that’s been revealed as a fluid-filled superhighway spanning the entire body. It’s called: the interstitium.

    Orion Magazine | How to Queer Ecology: One Goose at a Time Jennifer Brandel 2023

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