imbrication

1. (medicine) Overlapping of layers of tissue in wound closure or in correctional or reconstructive surgery.Examples: "SMAS flaps or SMASectomies are considered imbrications in this chapter. SMAS tightening is probably a more accurate description with 'open' SMAS techniques referring to imbrication and 'closed' SMAS techniques referring to plication."countableuncountable

2. (geology) A sedimentary deposition in which small, flat stones are tiled in the same direction so that they overlap.Examples: "The Archean basement beyond and beneath the northwest flanks of the turbidite basins constitutes the cratonic foreland against which northwest-directed tectonic imbrication is thought to have occurred."countableuncountable

3. (linguistics) A phenomenon occurring in many Bantu languages in which morphemes interweave in certain morphophonological conditions.Examples: "The Kiyaka perfective, applicative, and causative suffixes display an unusual type of infixation known in the Bantu literature as “imbrication” (see e.g. the discussion of imbrication in Tiene in chapters 4 and 6)."countableuncountable

4. (programming) The use of relative positioning, often by varying amounts of indentation, to define hierarchical relationships between elements of code.Examples: "Only a subset of YAML is used: sequences are only expected to contain scalars and mappings are only expected to contain a scalar or a mapping, but with only one level of imbrication."Synonyms: nestingcountableuncountable