Enucleates

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To remove or extract the nucleus from a cell or organism
2. To separate the core or central part from a particular structure or entity
3. To isolate the essential component while discarding the surrounding material

Etymology: "Enucleates" is the third-person singular form of "enucleate," so it simply describes the action: to take out the nucleus of a cell or the kernel of something. The verb comes from Latin "ēnucleō," meaning "to remove the kernel from," and it is built from the prefix "ē-" ("out of," "away") and "nucleus," the Latin word for a kernel or nut. The prefix is the same one found in "eject" and "evade," so the word is essentially "kernel-out." The Latin "nucleus" was a diminutive of "nux," meaning "nut," which is why the same idea of a hard, central seed sits at the heart of both the biological and the everyday sense. English borrowed the verb directly from Latin, and its scientific use followed the nineteenth-century rise of cell biology, when "nucleus" was adopted for the central body of a cell.