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Dilbert

Dilbert is an American comic strip written and illustrated by Scott Adams, first published on April 16, 1989. It is known for its satirical office humor about a white-collar, micromanaged office with engineer Dilbert as the title character. It has led to dozens of books, an animated television series, a video game, and hundreds of themed merchandise items. Dilbert Future and The Joy of Work are among the best-selling books in the series. In 1997, Adams received the National Cartoonists Society Reuben Award and the Newspaper Comic Strip Award for his work. Dilbert appears online and as of 2013 was published daily in 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries and 25 languages.

In 2023, Dilbert was dropped by numerous independent newspapers as well as its distributor, Andrews McMeel Syndication (which owns GoComics, from where the comic was also removed), after Adams published a video where he called Black Americans that disagreed with "It's okay to be white" a "hate group" and said white Americans should "get the hell away from" them. The video was widely described by sources such as The Economist and Reuters as containing "racist comments" and being a "racist rant." Adams has stated during the controversy that he disavows racism. The following month, Adams relaunched the strip as a webcomic on Locals under the name Daily Dilbert Reborn.

Publication history
Dilbert began syndication by United Feature Syndicate (a division of United Media) in April 1989.

On June 3, 2010, United Media sold its licensing arm, along with the rights to Dilbert, to Iconix Brand Group. This led to Dilbert leaving United Media. In late December 2010, it was announced that Dilbert would move to Universal Uclick (a division of Andrews McMeel Universal, known as Andrews McMeel Syndication) beginning in June 2011, where it remained until 2023.

In September 2022, Lee Enterprises ceased running the strip in what Scott Adams reported as 77 newspapers as the publisher declined to include the strip in a new comics page that was instituted throughout the company. He said that he had received complaints about Dilbert mocking the environmental, social, and corporate governance movement, but that he was not sure if that was the reason for the cancellation. The San Francisco Chronicle, owned by Hearst Media dropped Dilbert in October 2022 saying the move came after strips joked that reparations for slavery could be claimed by underperforming office workers.

In February 2023, hundreds of newspapers owned by media conglomerates including Andrews McMeel Syndication dropped the comic in response to a YouTube video published by Adams on February 22, 2023, during which he advised white people to "get the hell away from black people" following publication of a Rasmussen Reports poll which Adams said showed that African-American people collectively form a "hate group". The poll found that 53% of African-Americans agree with the statement "It's okay to be White", while 26% disagreed, and 21% responded they were "not sure". Gannett, including its USA Today network (including the Detroit Free Press, The Indianapolis Star, The Cincinnati Enquirer, and The Arizona Republic) also dropped the strip following Adams's comments. Such major newspapers as The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Seattle Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Plain Dealer all ceased to syndicate Dilbert and published editorials denouncing Adams. The Los Angeles Times also stated it had removed four Dilbert cartoons from its pages in the preceding nine months when they did not meet the newspaper's standards. In response, Adams announced that on March 16, 2023, he would launch Dilbert Reborn on the subscription website Locals, describing it as "spicier than the original".

Themes
The comic strip originally revolved around the character Dilbert and his "pet" dog Dogbert in their home. Many early plots revolved around Dilbert's engineer nature, bizarre inventions, and megalomaniacal ambitions. Later, the setting of most of the strips was changed to Dilbert's workplace and the strip began to satirize technology, workplace, and company issues. The strip's popular success is attributable to its workplace setting and themes, which are familiar to a large and appreciative audience. Adams said that switching the setting from Dilbert's home to his office was "when the strip really started to take off". The workplace location is Silicon Valley.

Dilbert portrays corporate culture as a Kafkaesque world of bureaucracy for its own sake, where office politics preclude productivity, employees' skills and efforts are not rewarded, and busy work is praised. Much of the humor involves characters making ridiculous decisions in reaction to mismanagement.

Dilbert
The strip's central character, Dilbert is depicted as a technically-minded engineer. Until October 2014, he was usually depicted wearing a white dress shirt, black trousers and a red-and-black striped tie that inexplicably curved upward. After October 13, 2014, his standard apparel changed to a red polo shirt with a name badge on a lanyard around his neck. He is a skilled engineer but has poor social and romantic lives.

Pointy-Haired Boss (PHB)
Dilbert's boss, known only as the Pointy-Haired Boss, is the unnamed, oblivious manager of the engineering division of Dilbert's company. Adams states that he never named him so that people can imagine him to be their boss. In earlier strips he was depicted as a stereotypical late-middle-aged balding middle manager with jowls; it was not until later that he developed his signature pointy hair and the jowls disappeared. He is hopelessly incompetent at management, and he often tries to compensate for his lack of skills with countless group therapy sessions and business strategies that rarely bear fruit. He does not understand technical issues but always tries to disguise this ineptitude, usually by using buzzwords he also does not understand. The Boss treats his employees alternately with enthusiasm or neglect; he often uses them to his own ends regardless of the consequences to them. Adams himself wrote that "he's not sadistic, just uncaring". His level of intelligence varies from near-vegetative to perceptive and clever, depending on the strip's comic needs. His utter lack of consistent business ethics, however, is perfectly consistent. His brother is a demon named "Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light", and according to Adams, the pointy hair is intended to remind one of devil horns.

Wally
One of the longest-serving engineers, Wally was originally a worker trying to get fired to obtain a large severance package. He hates work and avoids it whenever he can. He often carries a cup of coffee, calmly sipping from it even in the midst of chaos or office-shaking revelations. Wally is extremely cynical. He is even more socially inept than Dilbert (though far less self-aware of the fact), and references to his lack of personal hygiene are not uncommon. Like the Pointy-Haired Boss, Wally is utterly lacking in ethics and will take advantage of any situation to maximize his personal gain while doing the least possible amount of honest work. Until the change to "business dorky" wear of a polo shirt, Wally was invariably portrayed wearing a short sleeved dress shirt and tie. Adams has stated that Wally was based on a Pacific Bell coworker of his who was interested in a generous employee buy-out program—for the company's worst employees. This had the effect of causing this man—whom Adams describes as "one of the more brilliant people I've met"—to work hard at being incompetent, rude, and generally poor at his job to qualify for the buy-out program. Adams has said that this inspired the basic laziness and amorality of Wally's character. Despite these personality traits, Wally is accepted as part of Dilbert, Ted, Alice, and Asok's clique. Although his relationship with Alice is often antagonistic and Dilbert occasionally denies being his friend, their actions show at least a certain acceptance of him. For Asok, Wally serves as something of a guru of counterintuitive "wisdom". Wally exasperates Dilbert at times but is also sometimes the only other co-worker who understands Dilbert's frustrations with company idiocy and bureaucracy. While Dilbert rages at the dysfunction of the policies of the company, Wally has learned to use the dysfunction to cloak, even justify, his laziness.

Alice
One of the more competent and highest paid engineers. She is often frustrated at work because she does not get proper recognition, which she believes is because she is female. She has a quick, often violent temper, sometimes putting her "Fist of Death" to use, even with the Pointy-haired Boss. Alice is based on a woman that Adams worked with named Anita, who is described as sharing Alice's "pink suit, fluffy hair, technical proficiency, coffee obsession, and take-no-crap attitude."

Dogbert
Dilbert's anthropomorphic pet dog is the smartest dog on Earth. Dogbert is a megalomaniac intellectual dog, planning to one day conquer the world. He once succeeded, but became bored with the ensuing peace, and quit. Often seen in high-ranking consultant or technical support jobs, he constantly abuses his power and fools the management of Dilbert's company, though considering the intelligence of the company's management in general and Dilbert's boss in particular, this is not very hard to do. He also enjoys pulling scams on unsuspecting and usually dull customers to steal their money. However, despite Dogbert's cynical exterior, he has been known to pull his master out of some tight jams. Dogbert's nature as a pet was more emphasized during the earlier years of the strip; as the strip progressed, references to his acting like a dog became less common, although he still wags his tail when he perpetrates his scams. When an older Dilbert arrives while time-traveling from the future, he refers to Dogbert as "majesty", indicating that Dogbert will one day indeed rule the world again, and make worshipping him retroactive so he could boss around time travelers.

Catbert
Catbert is the "evil director of human resources" in the Dilbert comic strip. He was supposed to be a one-time character but resonated with readers so well that Adams brought him back as the HR director. Catbert's origins with the company are that he was hired by Dogbert. Dogbert hired him because he wanted an H.R. Director that appeared cute while secretly downsizing employees.

Asok
A young intern, Asok works very hard but does not always get proper recognition. He is intensely intelligent but naive about corporate life; the shattering of his optimistic illusions becomes frequent comic fodder. He is Indian and graduated from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). The other workers, especially the Boss, often unwittingly trample on his cultural beliefs. On the occasions when Asok mentions this, he is normally ignored. His test scores (a perfect 1600 on the old SAT) and his IQ of 240 show that he is the smartest member of the engineering team. Nonetheless, he is often called upon by the Boss to do odd jobs, and in meetings his ideas are usually left hanging. He is also seen regularly at the lunch table with Wally and Dilbert, experiencing jarring realizations of the nature of corporate life. There are a few jokes about his psychic powers, which he learned at the IIT. Yet despite his intelligence, ethics, and mystical powers, Asok sometimes takes advice from Wally in the arts of laziness, and from Dilbert in surviving the office. As of February 7, 2014, Asok is officially gay, which never affects any storylines but merely commemorates a decision by the Indian Supreme Court to uphold a British-era anti-gay law, a decision which was overturned on September 6, 2018.

The CEO
The CEO of the company is bald and has an extremely tall, somewhat pointed cranium. He is only slightly less clueless than the Pointy-Haired Boss.

Ted
An engineer who is often seen hanging out with Wally. He is referenced by name more often in older comics, but he is still seen occasionally. He has been accepted into Dilbert's clique. He has been fired and killed numerous times (for example, being pushed down a flight of stairs and becoming possessed), in which case a new Ted is apparently hired. In addition to this, he is often promoted and given benefits over the other employees. Ted has a wife and children who are referenced multiple times and seen on at least one occasion. Adams refers to him as Ted the Generic Guy, because whenever he needs to fire or kill someone he uses Ted, but slowly over time Ted has become his own character.

Tina
Also known as Tina the Tech Writer. She has a less forceful personality than Alice and often seems to get taken advantage of by the other employees. Her job of writing technical directions for her company's software cannot be an easy one as none of their products work as designed.

Carol
Carol is the long-suffering secretary (she prefers the title Executive Assistant) to the Pointy-haired Boss. Her hair style is a much smaller triangle than that of Alice. She hates her job, but once told Dilbert that spending time with her family of a husband and two children is like fighting porcupines in a salt mine, although when the job gets to be too much she is glad to get back to them.

Dave
Introduced in 2022, Dave is the strip's first black character, although he identifies as white, messing up the company's ESG and diversity scores, possibly deliberately, as it is not clear whether he is serious or not. Dave has proved controversial, with at least one newspaper chain deciding not to run the strips featuring him.

Elbonia
Elbonia is a fictional non-specific under-developed country used when Adams wants "to involve a foreign country without hurting overseas sales". He says "People think I have some specific country in mind when I write about Elbonia, but I don't. It represents the view that Americans have of any country that doesn't have cable television—we think they all wear fur hats and wallow around waist-deep in mud". The entire country wears the same clothing and hats, and all men and women have full beards. They are occasionally bitter towards their wealthier western neighbors, but are quite happy to trade with them. The whole country is covered in mud, and has limited technology.

Elbonia is located somewhere in the former Eastern Bloc: a strip dated April 2, 1990, refers to the "Tiny East European country of Elbonia." It is an extremely poor, fourth-world country that "has abandoned Communism". The national bird of Elbonia is the Frisbee.

Phil
The Pointy-Haired Boss's brother Phil. His full title is Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light & Supreme Ruler of Heck. His job, one step down from Satan, is to punish those who commit minor sins. His 'Pitch-Spoon' is feared by those who do. He is known to 'Darn to Heck' people who do things like using cell phones in the bathroom, steal office supplies, or those who simply do something annoying. In one strip, it was mentioned that being in Heck is not as bad as being in a cubicle.

Ratbert
Ratbert is an escaped lab rat who lives in Dilbert's house. Ratbert was not originally intended to be a regular, instead being part of a series of strips featuring a lab scientist's cruel experiments. The character is often seen in strips set in Dilbert's home and is frequently a foil / co-conspirator in Dogbert's machinations.

Legacy
The popularity of the comic strip within the corporate sector led to the Dilbert character being used in many business magazines and publications, including several appearances on the cover of Fortune Magazine. Many newspapers ran the comic in their business section rather than in the regular comics section—similar to the way that Doonesbury is often featured in the editorial section, due to its pointed commentary.

Criticism and parody
Media analyst Norman Solomon and cartoonist Tom Tomorrow claim that Adams's caricatures of corporate culture seem to project empathy for white-collar workers, but the satire ultimately plays into the hands of upper corporate management itself. Solomon describes the characters of Dilbert as dysfunctional time-wasters, none of whom occupies a position higher than middle management, and whose inefficiencies detract from corporate values such as productivity and growth. Dilbert and his coworkers often find themselves baffled or victimized by the whims of managerial behavior, but they never seem to question it openly. Solomon cites the Xerox corporation's use of Dilbert strips and characters in internally distributed pamphlets:

"Xerox management had recognized what more gullible Dilbert readers did not: Dilbert is an offbeat sugary substance that helps the corporate medicine go down. The Dilbert phenomenon accepts—and perversely eggs on—many negative aspects of corporate existence as unchangeable facets of human nature... As Xerox managers grasped, Dilbert speaks to some very real work experiences while simultaneously eroding inclinations to fight for better working conditions."

Adams responded in the February 2, 1998, strip and in his book The Joy of Work with a sarcastic reiteration.

In 1997, Tom Vanderbilt wrote in a similar vein in The Baffler magazine:

"Labor unions haven't adopted Dilbert characters as insignia. But corporations in droves have rushed to link themselves with Dilbert. Why? Dilbert mirrors the mass media's crocodile tears for working people—and echoes the ambient noises from Wall Street."

In 1998, Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead, chided Dilbert for crude drawings and simplistic humor. He wrote, "Long since psychically kidnapped by the gaudy, mindlessly hyperactive world of television, (readers) no longer demand or expect comic strips to be compelling, challenging, or even interesting. Enter Cathy. And Dilbert. Sure, comics are still funny. It's just that the humor has almost no 'nutritional' value. In the tiny space allotted to them, daily strips have all too successfully adapted to their new environment. In this Darwinian set-up, what thrives are simply drawn panels, minimal dialogue, and a lot of head-and-shoulder shots. Anything more complicated is deemed 'too hard to read'. A full, rich drawing style is a drawback. Simplicity, even crudity, rules."

Adams responded by creating two comic strips called Pippy the Ziphead, in which Dogbert creates a comic by "cramming as much artwork in [it] as possible so no one will notice there's only one joke", and it's "on the reader". Dilbert says that the strip is "nothing but a clown with a small head who says random things", and Dogbert responds that he is "maintaining [his] artistic integrity by creating a comic that no one will enjoy." In September of the same year, Griffith mocked Adams's Pippy the Ziphead with a strip of the same name drawn in a simplistic, stiff, Dilbert-like style set in an office setting and featuring the characters Zippy and Griffy retorting, "I sense a joke was delivered." "Yes. It was. My one joke. Ha."

In the late 1990s, amateur cartoonist Karl Hörnell began submitting a comic strip to Savage Dragon creator Erik Larsen that parodied both Dilbert and the Image Comics series The Savage Dragon. This became a regular feature in the Savage Dragon comic book, titled The Savage Dragonbert and Hitler's Brainbert—"Hitler's Brainbert" being a loose parody of both Dogbert and the Savage Dragon villain identified as Adolf Hitler's disembodied, superpowered brain. The strip began as a specific parody of the comic book itself, set loosely within the office structure of Dilbert, with Hörnell doing an emulation of Adams's cartooning style.

Language
Adams has invited readers to invent words that have become popular among fans in describing their own office environments, such as induhvidual. This term is based on the American English slang expression "duh!" The conscious misspelling of individual as induhvidual is a pejorative term for people who are not in Dogbert's New Ruling Class (DNRC). Its coining is explained in Dilbert Newsletter #6. The strip has also popularized the usage of the terms cow-orker and PHB.

Management
In 1997, Adams masqueraded as a management consultant to Logitech executives (as Ray Mebert), with the cooperation of the company's vice-chairman. He acted in much the way that he portrays management consultants in the comic strip, with an arrogant manner and bizarre suggestions, such as comparing mission statements to broccoli soup. He convinced the executives to change their existing mission statement for their New Ventures Group from "provide Logitech with profitable growth and related new business areas" to "scout profitable growth opportunities in relationships, both internally and externally, in emerging, mission-inclusive markets, and explore new paradigms and then filter and communicate and evangelize the findings".

To demonstrate what can be achieved with the most mundane objects if planned correctly and imaginatively, Adams has worked with companies to develop "dream" products for Dilbert and company. In 2001, he collaborated with design company IDEO to come up with the "perfect cubicle", a fitting creation since many of the Dilbert strips make fun of the standard cubicle desk and the environment that it creates. The result was both whimsical and practical.

This project was followed in 2004 with designs for Dilbert's Ultimate House (abbreviated as DUH). An energy-efficient building was the result, designed to prevent many of the little problems that seem to creep into a normal building. For instance, to save time spent buying and decorating a Christmas tree every year, the house has a large (yet unapparent) closet adjacent to the living room where the tree can be stored from year to year.

Webcomics
In 1995, Dilbert was the first syndicated comic strip to be published for free on the Internet. Putting his email address in each Dilbert strip, Adams created a "direct channel to [his] customers", allowing him to modify the strip based on their feedback. Joe Zabel stated that Dilbert had a large influence on many of the webcomics that followed it, establishing the "nerdcore" genre as it found its audience.

In April 2008, United Media instituted an interactive feature on Dilbert.com, allowing fans to write speech bubbles. Adams has spoken positively about the change, saying, "This makes cartooning a competitive sport."

Awards
Adams was named best international comic strip artist of 1995 in the Adamson Awards given by the Swedish Academy of Comic Art.

Dilbert won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award in 1997, and was also named the best syndicated strip of 1997 in the Harvey Awards. In 1998, Dilbert won the Max & Moritz Prize as best international comic strip.

Business books

 * The Dilbert Principle
 * Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook
 * The Dilbert Future
 * The Joy of Work
 * Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel
 * Slapped Together: The Dilbert Business Anthology (The Dilbert Principle, The Dilbert Future, and The Joy of Work, published together in one book)

Other books

 * Telling It Like It Isn't — 1996; ISBN 0-8362-1324-6
 * You Don't Need Experience If You've Got Attitude — 1996; ISBN 0-8362-2196-6
 * Access Denied: Dilbert's Quest for Love in the Nineties — 1996; ISBN 0-8362-2191-5
 * Conversations With Dogbert — 1996; ISBN 0-8362-2197-4
 * Work is a Contact Sport — 1997; ISBN 0-8362-2878-2
 * The Boss: Nameless, Blameless and Shameless — 1997; ISBN 0-8362-3223-2
 * The Dilbert Bunch — 1997; ISBN 0-8362-2879-0
 * No You'd Better Watch Out — 1997
 * Please Don't Feed The Egos — 1997; ISBN 0-8362-3224-0
 * Random Acts of Catness — 1998; ISBN 0-8362-5277-2
 * You Can't Schedule Stupidity — 1998; ISBN 0-8362-5632-8
 * Dilbert Meeting Book Exceeding Tech Limits — 1998; ISBN 0-7683-2028-3
 * Trapped In A Dilbert World – Book Of Days — 1998; ISBN 0-7683-2030-5
 * Work—The Wally Way — 1999; ISBN 0-8362-7480-6
 * Alice in Blunderland — 1999; ISBN 0-8362-7479-2
 * All Dressed Down And Nowhere To Go — 2002; ISBN 0-7407-2931-4
 * Dilbert's Guide to the Rest of Your Life: Dispatches from Cubicleland — 2007; ISBN 0-7624-2781-7
 * Dilbert Sudoku Comic Digest: 200 Puzzles Plus 50 Classic Dilbert Cartoons — 2008; ISBN 0-7407-7250-3
 * Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert — 2008; 576 pages, ≈6500 strips, and Adams's notes from 1989 to 2008.

Merchandise

 * Young Dilbert in Hi-Tech Hijinks — 1997; A Dilbert-branded computer game aimed at teaching young children about technology.
 * Corporate Shuffle by Richard Garfield — 1997; A Dilbert-branded card game similar to Wizards of the Coast's The Great Dalmuti and the drinking game President.
 * The Dilberito, a vegan microwave burrito offered in four flavors: Barbecue with barbecue sauce, Garlic & Herb with sauce, Indian with mango chutney, and Mexican with salsa.
 * Totally Nuts — 1998; A limited edition Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavor whose description was listed as: "Butter almond ice cream with roasted hazelnuts, praline pecans & white fudge coated almonds".
 * A line of Dilbert mints that possessed the names Accomplish-mints, Appease-mints, Appoint-mints, Empower-mints, Harass-mints, Improve-mints, Invest-mints, Manage-mints, Pay-mints, Perform-mints, and Postpone-mints.
 * Dilbert: the Board Game — 2006; by Hyperion Games; A Dilbert-branded board game that was named one of Games magazine's Top 100 Games
 * Day-by-Day calendars featuring the comic strip are available every year.
 * Dilbert: Escape From Cubeville — 2010; A Dilbert-branded board game released in the Dilbert store section of dilbert.com.
 * Dilbert's Desktop Games, a video game designed for the PC.

Animated series
Dilbert was adapted into a UPN animated television series starring Daniel Stern as Dilbert, Chris Elliott as Dogbert, and Kathy Griffin as Alice. The series ran for two seasons from January 25, 1999, to July 25, 2000. The first season centered around the creation of a new product called the "Gruntmaster 6000". It was critically acclaimed and won an Emmy Award, leading to its renewal for a second season. The second season did away with the serial format and was composed entirely of standalone episodes, many of which shifted focus away from the workplace and involved absurdist plots such as Wally being mistaken for a religious leader ("The Shroud of Wally") and Dilbert being accused of mass murder ("The Trial"). The second season's two-episode finale included Dilbert getting pregnant with the child of a cow, a hillbilly, robot DNA, "several dozen engineers", an elderly billionaire, and an alien, eventually ending up in a custody battle with Stone Cold Steve Austin as the Judge.

When UPN declined to renew the series for its third season, Adams stated, "I lost my TV show for being white when UPN decided it would focus on an African-American audience." Adams wrote on Twitter in 2020. "That was the third job I lost for being white. The other two in corporate America." The four-disc DVD called "Dilbert: The Complete Series" was released and contains thirty episodes. The first disc contains episodes 1–7, the second disc contains episodes 8–13, the third disc contains episodes 14–21, and the fourth disc contains episodes 22–30.

Animated web shorts
On April 7, 2008, dilbert.com presented its first Dilbert animation. The new Dilbert animations are animated versions of original comic strips produced by RingTales and animated by Powerhouse Animation Studios. The animation videos run for around 30 seconds each and are added every weekday. The comic shorts have a different voice cast than the television series, with Washington-based radio personality Dan Roberts providing the voice of the title character. On December 10, 2009, the RingTales produced animations were made available as a calendar application for mobile devices.

Cancelled film adaptation
As early as 2006, Adams and United Media had been struggling to get a film adaptation of the comic strip off the ground. Adams envisioned the idea as a live-action film, with Dogbert and Catbert as animated characters. Film director Chris Columbus was in talks to direct the film in 2007, with Tariq Jalil on board as producer.

In May 2010, it was announced that a live-action Dilbert film was in development. Ken Kwapis was announced as director, fresh off the heels of He's Just Not That Into You and directing several episodes for NBC's The Office. Jahil remained as producer, with Phoenix Entertainment and Intrigue Entertainment joining the producing team.

But in December 2017, in an interview by The Mercury News, Adams said that it would be impossible to make the film after his public support of Donald Trump.

"Drunken lemurs" case
In October 2007, the Catfish Bend Casino in Burlington, Iowa notified its staff that the casino would soon be closing for business. David Steward, an employee of seven years, then posted on an office bulletin board the Dilbert strip of October 26, 2007, that compared management decisions to those of "drunken lemurs". The casino called this "very offensive"; they identified him from a surveillance tape, fired him, and tried to prevent him from receiving unemployment benefits. However, an administrative law judge ruled in December 2007 that he would receive benefits, as his action was deemed as justified protest and not intentional misbehavior. Adams stated that it might be the first confirmed case of an employee being fired for posting a Dilbert cartoon. On February 20, 2008, the first of a series of Dilbert strips showed Wally being caught posting a comic strip that "compares managers to drunken lemurs". Adams later stated that fans of his work should "stick to posting Garfield strips, as no one gets fired for that."

Guest artists
On February 29, 2016, Adams posted on his blog that he would be taking a six-week vacation. During that time, strips would be written by him but drawn by guest artists who work for Universal Uclick. Jake Tapper drew the strip on the week of May 23. The other guest artists were John Glynn, Eric Scott, Josh Shipley, Joel Friday, Donna Oatney and Brenna Thummler. Jake Tapper also drew the cartoon strip the week of September 23–28, 2019.

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Dialect

Dialect (from Latin, , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from ,  'through' and ,  'I speak') refers to two distinctly different types of linguistic relationships.

The more common usage of the term in English refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The dialects or varieties of a particular language are closely related and, despite their differences, are most often largely mutually intelligible, especially if geographically close to one another in a dialect continuum. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class or ethnicity. A dialect that is associated with a particular social class can be termed a sociolect, a dialect that is associated with a particular ethnic group can be termed an ethnolect, and a geographical/regional dialect may be termed a regiolect (alternative terms include 'regionalect', 'geolect', and 'topolect' ). Any variety of a given language can be classified as a "dialect", including any standardized varieties.

The other usage, which refers to colloquial settings, typically diglossic, in a few countries like Italy, such as dialetto, patois in France, much of East Central Europe, and the Philippines, may carry a pejorative undertone and underlines the politically and socially subordinated status of an autochthonous non-national language to the country's official language(s). Dialects in this sense do not derive from a dominant language, are therefore not one of its varieties, but they evolved in a separate and parallel way. While they may be historically cognate with and share genetic roots in the same subfamily as the dominant national language and may, to a varying degree, share some mutual intelligibility with the latter, "dialects" under this second definition are separate languages from the standard or national language. Under this definition, the standard or national language would not itself be considered a dialect, as it is the dominant language in terms of linguistic prestige, social or political (e.g. official) status, predominance or prevalence, or all of the above. Dialect used this way implies a political connotation, often being used to refer to non-standardized "low-prestige" languages (regardless of their actual degree of distance from the national language) of limited geographic distribution, languages lacking institutional support, or even those considered to be "unsuitable for writing".

A third designation dialect is occasionally used popularly to refer to the unwritten or non-codified languages of developing countries or isolated areas, where the term "vernacular language" would be preferred by linguists. Features that distinguish dialects from each other can be found in lexicon (vocabulary) and grammar (morphology, syntax) as well as in pronunciation (phonology, including prosody). In instances where the salient distinctions are only or mostly to be observed in pronunciation, the more specific term accent may be used instead of dialect. Differences that are largely concentrated in lexicon may be classified as creoles. When lexical differences are mostly concentrated in the specialized vocabulary of a profession or other organization, they are jargons. Differences in vocabulary that are deliberately cultivated to exclude outsiders or to serve as shibboleths are known as cryptolects or cant, and include slangs and argots. The particular speech patterns used by an individual are referred to as that person's idiolect.

Languages are classified as dialects based on linguistic distance. The dialects of a language with a writing system will operate at different degrees of distance from the standardized written form. Some dialects of a language are not mutually intelligible in spoken form, leading to debate as to whether they are regiolects or separate languages.

Standard and nonstandard dialects
A standard dialect also known as a "standardized language" is supported by institutions. Such institutional support may include any or all of the following: government recognition or designation; formal presentation in schooling as the "correct" form of a language; informal monitoring of everyday usage; published grammars, dictionaries, and textbooks that set forth a normative spoken and written form; and an extensive formal literature (be it prose, poetry, non-fiction, etc.) that uses it. An example of a standardized language is the French language which is supported by the Académie Française institution. A nonstandard dialect also has a complete grammar and vocabulary, but is usually not the beneficiary of institutional support.

The distinction between the "standard" dialect and the "nonstandard" (vernacular) dialects of the same language is often arbitrary and based on social, political, cultural, or historical considerations or prevalence and prominence. In a similar way, the definitions of the terms "language" and "dialect" may overlap and are often subject to debate, with the differentiation between the two classifications often grounded in arbitrary or sociopolitical motives, and the term "dialect" is sometimes restricted to mean "non-standard variety", particularly in non-specialist settings and non-English linguistic traditions.

Dialect as linguistic variety of a language
The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class or ethnicity. A dialect that is associated with a particular social class can be termed a sociolect. A dialect that is associated with a particular ethnic group can be termed an ethnolect.

A geographical/regional dialect may be termed a regiolect (alternative terms include 'regionalect', 'geolect', and 'topolect' ). According to this definition, any variety of a given language can be classified as "a dialect", including any standardized varieties. In this case, the distinction between the "standard language" (i.e. the "standard" dialect of a particular language) and the "nonstandard" (vernacular) dialects of the same language is often arbitrary and based on social, political, cultural, or historical considerations or prevalence and prominence. In a similar way, the definitions of the terms "language" and "dialect" may overlap and are often subject to debate, with the differentiation between the two classifications often grounded in arbitrary or sociopolitical motives. The term "dialect" is however sometimes restricted to mean "non-standard variety", particularly in non-specialist settings and non-English linguistic traditions. Conversely, some dialectologists have reserved the term "dialect" for forms that they believed (sometimes wrongly) to be purer forms of the older languages, as in how early dialectologists of English did not consider the Brummie of Birmingham or the Scouse of Liverpool to be real dialects, as they had arisen fairly recently in time and partly as a result of influences from Irish migrants.

Difference between dialects and languages
There is no universally accepted criterion for distinguishing two different languages from two dialects (i.e. varieties) of the same language. A number of rough measures exist, sometimes leading to contradictory results. The distinction between dialect and language is therefore subjective and depends upon the user's preferred frame of reference. For example, there has been discussion about whether or not the Limón Creole English should be considered "a kind" of English or a different language. This creole is spoken in the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica (Central America) by descendants of Jamaican people. The position that Costa Rican linguists support depends upon which university they represent. Another example is Scanian, which even, for a time, had its own ISO code.

Linguistic distance
An important criterion for categorizing varieties of language is linguistic distance. For a variety to be considered a dialect, the linguistic distance between the two varieties must be low. Linguistic distance between spoken or written forms of language increases as the differences between the forms are characterized. For example, two languages with completely different syntactical structures would have a high linguistic distance, while a language with very few differences from another may be considered a dialect or a sibling of that language. Linguistic distance may be used to determine language families and language siblings. For example, languages with little linguistic distance, like Dutch and German, are considered siblings. Dutch and German are siblings in the West-Germanic language group. Some language siblings are closer to each other in terms of linguistic distance than to other linguistic siblings. French and Spanish, siblings in the Romance Branch of the Indo-European group, are closer to each other than they are to any of the languages of the West-Germanic group. When languages are close in terms of linguistic distance, they resemble one another, hence why dialects are not considered linguistically distant to their parent language.

Mutual intelligibility
One criterion, which is often considered to be purely linguistic, is that of mutual intelligibility: two varieties are said to be dialects of the same language if being a speaker of one variety has sufficient knowledge to understand and be understood by a speaker of the other dialect; otherwise, they are said to be different languages. However, this definition has often been criticized, especially in the case of a dialect continuum (or dialect chain), which contains a sequence of varieties, where each mutually intelligible with the next, but may not be mutually intelligible with distant varieties.

Others have argued that mutual intelligibility occurs in varying degrees, and the potential difficulty in distinguishing between intelligibility and prior familiarity with the other variety. However, recent research suggests that there is some empirical evidence in favor of using some form of the intelligibility criterion to distinguish between languages and dialects, though mutuality may not be as relevant as initially thought. The requirement for mutuality is abandoned by the Language Survey Reference Guide of SIL International, publishers of the Ethnologue and the registration authority for the ISO 639-3 standard for language codes. They define a dialect cluster as a central variety together with all those varieties whose speakers understand the central variety at a specified threshold level or higher. If the threshold level is high, usually between 70% and 85%, the cluster is designated as a language.

Sociolinguistic definitions
Another occasionally used criterion for discriminating dialects from languages is the sociolinguistic notion of linguistic authority. According to this definition, two varieties are considered dialects of the same language if (under at least some circumstances) they would defer to the same authority regarding some questions about their language. For instance, to learn the name of a new invention, or an obscure foreign species of plant, speakers of Westphalian and East Franconian German might each consult a German dictionary or ask a German-speaking expert in the subject. Thus these varieties are said to be dependent on, or heteronomous with respect to, Standard German, which is said to be autonomous.

In contrast, speakers in the Netherlands of Low Saxon varieties similar to Westphalian would instead consult a dictionary of Standard Dutch, and hence is categorized as a dialect of Dutch instead. Similarly, although Yiddish is classified by linguists as a language in the High German group of languages and has some degree of mutual intelligibility with German, a Yiddish speaker would consult a Yiddish dictionary rather than a German dictionary in such a case, and is classified as its own language.

Within this framework, W. A. Stewart defined a language as an autonomous variety in addition to all the varieties that are heteronomous with respect to it, noting that an essentially equivalent definition had been stated by Charles A. Ferguson and John J. Gumperz in 1960. A heteronomous variety may be considered a dialect of a language defined in this way. In these terms, Danish and Norwegian, though mutually intelligible to a large degree, are considered separate languages. In the framework of Heinz Kloss, these are described as languages by ausbau (development) rather than by abstand (separation).

Dialect and language clusters
In other situations, a closely related group of varieties possess considerable (though incomplete) mutual intelligibility, but none dominates the others. To describe this situation, the editors of the Handbook of African Languages introduced the term dialect cluster as a classificatory unit at the same level as a language. A similar situation, but with a greater degree of mutual unintelligibility, has been termed a language cluster.

In the Language Survey Reference Guide issued by SIL International, who produce Ethnologue, a dialect cluster is defined as a central variety together with a collection of varieties whose speakers can understand the central variety at a specified threshold level (usually between 70% and 85%) or higher. It is not required that peripheral varieties be understood by speakers of the central variety or of other peripheral varieties. A minimal set of central varieties providing coverage of a dialect continuum may be selected algorithmically from intelligibility data.

Political factors
In many societies, however, a particular dialect, often the sociolect of the elite class, comes to be identified as the "standard" or "proper" version of a language by those seeking to make a social distinction and is contrasted with other varieties. As a result of this, in some contexts, the term "dialect" refers specifically to varieties with low social status. In this secondary sense of "dialect", language varieties are often called dialects rather than languages:
 * if they have no standard or codified form,
 * if they are rarely or never used in writing (outside reported speech),
 * if the speakers of the given language do not have a state of their own,
 * if they lack prestige with respect to some other, often standardised, variety.

The status of "language" is not solely determined by linguistic criteria, but it is also the result of a historical and political development. Romansh came to be a written language, and therefore it is recognized as a language, even though it is very close to the Lombardic alpine dialects and classical Latin. An opposite example is Chinese, whose variations such as Mandarin and Cantonese are often called dialects and not languages in China, despite their mutual unintelligibility.

National boundaries sometimes make the distinction between "language" and "dialect" an issue of political importance. A group speaking a separate "language" may be seen as having a greater claim to being a separate "people", and thus to be more deserving of its own independent state, while a group speaking a "dialect" may be seen as a sub-group, part of a bigger people, which must content itself with regional autonomy.

The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich published the expression, A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot ("אַ שפּראַך איז אַ דיאַלעקט מיט אַן אַרמײ און פֿלאָט": "A language is a dialect with an army and navy") in YIVO Bleter 25.1, 1945, p. 13. The significance of the political factors in any attempt at answering the question "what is a language?" is great enough to cast doubt on whether any strictly linguistic definition, without a socio-cultural approach, is possible. This is illustrated by the frequency with which the army-navy aphorism is cited.

Terminology
By the definition most commonly used by linguists, any linguistic variety can be considered a "dialect" of some language—"everybody speaks a dialect". According to that interpretation, the criteria above merely serve to distinguish whether two varieties are dialects of the same language or dialects of different languages.

The terms "language" and "dialect" are not necessarily mutually exclusive, although they are often perceived to be. Thus there is nothing contradictory in the statement "the language of the Pennsylvania Dutch is a dialect of German".

There are various terms that linguists may use to avoid taking a position on whether the speech of a community is an independent language in its own right or a dialect of another language. Perhaps the most common is "variety"; "lect" is another. A more general term is "languoid", which does not distinguish between dialects, languages, and groups of languages, whether genealogically related or not.

Colloquial meaning of dialect
The colloquial meaning of dialect can be understood by example, e.g. in Italy (see dialetto ), France (see patois) and the Philippines, carries a pejorative undertone and underlines the politically and socially subordinated status of a non-national language to the country's single official language. In other words, these "dialects" are not actual dialects in the same sense as in the first usage, as they do not derive from the politically dominant language and are therefore not one of its varieties, but instead they evolved in a separate and parallel way and may thus better fit various parties' criteria for a separate language.

Despite this, these "dialects" may often be historically cognate and share genetic roots in the same subfamily as the dominant national language and may even, to a varying degree, share some mutual intelligibility with the latter. In this sense, unlike in the first usage, the national language would not itself be considered a "dialect", as it is the dominant language in a particular state, be it in terms of linguistic prestige, social or political (e.g. official) status, predominance or prevalence, or all of the above. The term "dialect" used this way implies a political connotation, being mostly used to refer to low-prestige languages (regardless of their actual degree of distance from the national language), languages lacking institutional support, or those perceived as "unsuitable for writing". The designation "dialect" is also used popularly to refer to the unwritten or non-codified languages of developing countries or isolated areas, where the term "vernacular language" would be preferred by linguists.

Dialect and accent
John Lyons writes that "Many linguists [...] subsume differences of accent under differences of dialect." In general, accent refers to variations in pronunciation, while dialect also encompasses specific variations in grammar and vocabulary.

Arabic
There are three geographical zones in which Arabic is spoken (Jastrow 2002). Zone I is categorized as the area in which Arabic was spoken before the rise of Islam. It is the Arabian Peninsula, excluding the areas where southern Arabian was spoken. Zone II is categorized as the areas to which Arabic speaking peoples moved as a result of the conquests of Islam. Included in Zone II are the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, Iraq, and some parts of Iran. The Egyptian, Sudanese, and Levantine dialects (including the Syrian dialect) are well documented, and widely spoken and studied. Zone III comprises the areas in which Arabic is spoken outside of the continuous Arabic Language area.

Spoken dialects of the Arabic language share the same writing system and share Modern Standard Arabic as their common prestige dialect used in writing.

German
When talking about the German language, the term German dialects is only used for the traditional regional varieties. That allows them to be distinguished from the regional varieties of modern standard German. The German dialects show a wide spectrum of variation. Some of them are not mutually intelligible. German dialectology traditionally names the major dialect groups after Germanic tribes from which they were assumed to have descended.

The extent to which the dialects are spoken varies according to a number of factors: In Northern Germany, dialects are less common than in the South. In cities, dialects are less common than in the countryside. In a public environment, dialects are less common than in a familiar environment.

The situation in Switzerland and Liechtenstein is different from the rest of the German-speaking countries. The Swiss German dialects are the default everyday language in virtually every situation, whereas standard German is only spoken in education, partially in media, and with foreigners not possessing knowledge of Swiss German. Most Swiss German speakers perceive standard German to be a foreign language.

The Low German and Low Franconian varieties spoken in Germany are often counted among the German dialects. This reflects the modern situation where they are roofed by standard German. This is different from the situation in the Middle Ages when Low German had strong tendencies towards an ausbau language.

The Frisian languages spoken in Germany and the Netherlands are excluded from the German dialects.

Italy
Italy is an often quoted example of a country where the second definition of the word "dialect" (dialetto ) is most prevalent. Italy is in fact home to a vast array of separate languages, most of which lack mutual intelligibility with one another and have their own local varieties; twelve of them (Albanian, Catalan, German, Greek, Slovene, Croatian, French, Franco-Provençal, Friulian, Ladin, Occitan and Sardinian) underwent Italianization to a varying degree (ranging from the currently endangered state displayed by Sardinian and southern Italian Greek to the vigorous promotion of Germanic Tyrolean), but have been officially recognized as minority languages (minoranze linguistiche storiche), in light of their distinctive historical development. Yet, most of the regional languages spoken across the peninsula are often colloquially referred to in non-linguistic circles as Italian dialetti, since most of them, including the prestigious Neapolitan, Sicilian and Venetian, have adopted vulgar Tuscan as their reference language since the Middle Ages. However, all these languages evolved from Vulgar Latin in parallel with Italian, long prior to the popular diffusion of the latter throughout what is now Italy.

During the Risorgimento, Italian still existed mainly as a literary language, and only 2.5% of Italy's population could speak Italian. Proponents of Italian nationalism, like the Lombard Alessandro Manzoni, stressed the importance of establishing a uniform national language in order to better create an Italian national identity. With the unification of Italy in the 1860s, Italian became the official national language of the new Italian state, while the other ones came to be institutionally regarded as "dialects" subordinate to Italian, and negatively associated with a lack of education.

In the early 20th century, the conscription of Italian men from all throughout Italy during World War I is credited with having facilitated the diffusion of Italian among the less educated conscripted soldiers, as these men, who had been speaking various regional languages up until then, found themselves forced to communicate with each other in a common tongue while serving in the Italian military. With the popular spread of Italian out of the intellectual circles, because of the mass-media and the establishment of public education, Italians from all regions were increasingly exposed to Italian. While dialect levelling has increased the number of Italian speakers and decreased the number of speakers of other languages native to Italy, Italians in different regions have developed variations of standard Italian specific to their region. These variations of standard Italian, known as "regional Italian", would thus more appropriately be called dialects in accordance with the first linguistic definition of the term, as they are in fact derived from Italian, with some degree of influence from the local or regional native languages and accents.

The most widely spoken languages of Italy, which are not to be confused with regional Italian, fall within a family of which even Italian is part, the Italo-Dalmatian group. This wide category includes: Modern Italian is heavily based on the Florentine dialect of Tuscan. The Tuscan-based language that would eventually become modern Italian had been used in poetry and literature since at least the 12th century, and it first spread outside the Tuscan linguistic borders through the works of the so-called tre corone ("three crowns"): Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio. Florentine thus gradually rose to prominence as the volgare of the literate and upper class in Italy, and it spread throughout the peninsula and Sicily as the lingua franca among the Italian educated class as well as Italian travelling merchants. The economic prowess and cultural and artistic importance of Tuscany in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance further encouraged the diffusion of the Florentine-Tuscan Italian throughout Italy and among the educated and powerful, though local and regional languages remained the main languages of the common people.
 * the complex of the Tuscan and Central Italian dialects, such as Romanesco in Rome, with the addition of some distantly Corsican-derived varieties (Gallurese and Sassarese) spoken in Northern Sardinia;
 * the Neapolitan group (also known as "Intermediate Meridional Italian"), which encompasses not only Naples' and Campania's speech but also a variety of related neighboring varieties like the Irpinian dialect, Abruzzese and Southern Marchegiano, Molisan, Northern Calabrian or Cosentino, and the Bari dialect. The Cilentan dialect of Salerno, in Campania, is considered significantly influenced by the Neapolitan and the below-mentioned language groups;
 * the Sicilian group (also known as "Extreme Meridional Italian"), including Salentino and centro-southern Calabrian.

Aside from the Italo-Dalmatian languages, the second most widespread family in Italy is the Gallo-Italic group, spanning throughout much of Northern Italy's languages and dialects (such as Piedmontese, Emilian-Romagnol, Ligurian, Lombard, Venetian, Sicily's and Basilicata's Gallo-Italic in southern Italy, etc.).

Finally, other languages from a number of different families follow the last two major groups: the Gallo-Romance languages (French, Occitan and its Vivaro-Alpine dialect, Franco-Provençal); the Rhaeto-Romance languages (Friulian and Ladin); the Ibero-Romance languages (Sardinia's Algherese); the Germanic Cimbrian, Southern Bavarian, Walser German and the Mòcheno language; the Albanian Arbëresh language; the Hellenic Griko language and Calabrian Greek; the Serbo-Croatian Slavomolisano dialect; and the various Slovene languages, including the Gail Valley dialect and Istrian dialect. The language indigenous to Sardinia, while being Romance in nature, is considered to be a specific linguistic family of its own, separate from the other Neo-Latin groups; it is often subdivided into the Centro-Southern and Centro-Northern dialects.

Though mostly mutually unintelligible, the exact degree to which all the Italian languages are mutually unintelligible varies, often correlating with geographical distance or geographical barriers between the languages; some regional Italian languages that are closer in geographical proximity to each other or closer to each other on the dialect continuum are more or less mutually intelligible. For instance, a speaker of purely Eastern Lombard, a language in Northern Italy's Lombardy region that includes the Bergamasque dialect, would have severely limited mutual intelligibility with a purely Italian speaker and would be nearly completely unintelligible to a Sicilian-speaking individual. Due to Eastern Lombard's status as a Gallo-Italic language, an Eastern Lombard speaker may, in fact, have more mutual intelligibility with an Occitan, Catalan, or French speaker than with an Italian or Sicilian speaker. Meanwhile, a Sicilian-speaking person would have a greater degree of mutual intelligibility with a speaker of the more closely related Neapolitan language, but far less mutual intelligibility with a person speaking Sicilian Gallo-Italic, a language that developed in isolated Lombard emigrant communities on the same island as the Sicilian language.

Today, the majority of Italian nationals are able to speak Italian, though many Italians still speak their regional language regularly or as their primary day-to-day language, especially at home with family or when communicating with Italians from the same town or region.

The Balkans
The classification of speech varieties as dialects or languages and their relationship to other varieties of speech can be controversial and the verdicts inconsistent. Serbo-Croatian illustrates this point. Serbo-Croatian has two major formal variants (Serbian and Croatian). Both are based on the Shtokavian dialect and therefore mutually intelligible with differences found mostly in their respective local vocabularies and minor grammatical differences. Certain dialects of Serbia (Torlakian) and Croatia (Kajkavian and Chakavian), however, are not mutually intelligible even though they are usually subsumed under Serbo-Croatian. How these dialects should be classified in relation to Shtokavian remains a matter of dispute.

Macedonian, although largely mutually intelligible with Bulgarian and certain dialects of Serbo-Croatian (Torlakian), is considered by Bulgarian linguists to be a Bulgarian dialect, in contrast with the view in North Macedonia, which regards it as a language in its own right. Before the establishment of a literary standard of Macedonian in 1944, in most sources in and out of Bulgaria before the Second World War, the South Slavic dialect continuum covering the area of today's North Macedonia were referred to as Bulgarian dialects. Sociolinguists agree that the question of whether Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian or a language is a political one and cannot be resolved on a purely linguistic basis.

Lebanon
In Lebanon, a part of the Christian population considers "Lebanese" to be in some sense a distinct language from Arabic and not merely a dialect thereof. During the civil war, Christians often used Lebanese Arabic officially, and sporadically used the Latin script to write Lebanese, thus further distinguishing it from Arabic. All Lebanese laws are written in the standard literary form of Arabic, though parliamentary debate may be conducted in Lebanese Arabic.

North Africa
In Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, the Darijas translated as literally meaning Dialect in Arabic (spoken North African languages) are sometimes considered more different from other Arabic dialects. Officially, North African countries prefer to give preference to the Literary Arabic and conduct much of their political and religious life in it (adherence to Islam), and refrain from declaring each country's specific variety to be a separate language, because Literary Arabic is the liturgical language of Islam and the language of the Islamic sacred book, the Qur'an. Although, especially since the 1960s, the Darijas are occupying an increasing use and influence in the cultural life of these countries. Examples of cultural elements where Darijas' use became dominant include: theatre, film, music, television, advertisement, social media, folk-tale books and companies' names.

Ukraine
The Modern Ukrainian language has been in common use since the late 17th century, associated with the establishment of the Cossack Hetmanate. In the 19th century, the Tsarist Government of the Russian Empire claimed that Ukrainian (or Little Russian, per official name) was merely a dialect of Russian (or Polonized dialect) and not a language on its own (same concept as for Belarusian language). That concepted was enrooted soon after the partitions of Poland. According to these claims, the differences were few and caused by the conquest of western Ukraine by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. However, in reality the dialects in Ukraine were developing independently from the dialects in the modern Russia for several centuries, and as a result they differed substantially.

Following the Spring of Nations in Europe and efforts of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, across the so called "Southwestern Krai" of Russian Empire started to spread cultural societies of Hromada and their Sunday schools. Themselves "hromadas" acted in same manner as Orthodox fraternities of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth back in 15th century. Around that time in Ukraine becoming popular political movements Narodnichestvo (Narodniks) and Khlopomanstvo.

Moldova
There have been cases of a variety of speech being deliberately reclassified to serve political purposes. One example is Moldovan. In 1996, the Moldovan parliament, citing fears of "Romanian expansionism", rejected a proposal from President Mircea Snegur to change the name of the language to Romanian, and in 2003 a Moldovan–Romanian dictionary was published, purporting to show that the two countries speak different languages. Linguists of the Romanian Academy reacted by declaring that all the Moldovan words were also Romanian words; while in Moldova, the head of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova, Ion Bărbuţă, described the dictionary as a politically motivated "absurdity".

Greater China
Unlike languages that use alphabets to indicate their pronunciation, Chinese characters have developed from logograms that do not always give hints to their pronunciation. Although the written characters have remained relatively consistent for the last two thousand years, the pronunciation and grammar in different regions have developed to an extent that the varieties of the spoken language are often mutually unintelligible. As a series of migration to the south throughout the history, the regional languages of the south, including Gan, Xiang, Wu, Min, Yue and Hakka often show traces of Old Chinese or Middle Chinese. From the Ming dynasty onward, Beijing has been the capital of China and the dialect spoken in Beijing has had the most prestige among other varieties. With the founding of the Republic of China, Standard Mandarin was designated as the official language, based on the spoken language of Beijing. Since then, other spoken varieties are regarded as fangyan (regional speech). Cantonese is still the most commonly-used language in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau and among some overseas Chinese communities, whereas Hokkien has been accepted in Taiwan as an important local language alongside Mandarin.

Selected list of articles on dialects

 * Varieties of Arabic
 * Bengali dialects
 * Catalan dialects
 * Varieties of Chinese
 * Cypriot Greek
 * Cypriot Turkish
 * Danish dialects
 * Dutch dialects
 * English dialects
 * Finnish dialects
 * Varieties of French
 * Georgian dialects
 * German dialects
 * Malayalam languages
 * Varieties of Malay
 * Connacht Irish, Munster Irish, Ulster Irish
 * Italian dialects
 * Japanese dialects
 * Korean dialects
 * Norwegian dialects
 * Nguni languages
 * Dialects of Polish
 * Portuguese dialects
 * Romanian dialects
 * Russian dialects
 * Slavic microlanguages
 * Slovenian dialects
 * Spanish dialects
 * Swedish dialects
 * Sri Lankan Tamil dialects
 * Yiddish dialects

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Dialect


text:
Digitalis

Digitalis ( or ) is a genus of about 20 species of herbaceous perennial plants, shrubs, and biennials, commonly called foxgloves.

Digitalis is native to Europe, Western Asia, and northwestern Africa. The flowers are tubular in shape, produced on a tall spike, and vary in colour with species, from purple to pink, white, and yellow. The name derives from the Latin word for "finger". The genus was traditionally placed in the figwort family, Scrophulariaceae, but phylogenetic research led taxonomists to move it to the Veronicaceae in 2001. More recent phylogenetic work has placed it in the much enlarged family Plantaginaceae.

The best-known species is the common foxglove, Digitalis purpurea. This biennial is often grown as an ornamental plant due to its vivid flowers, which range in colour from various purple tints through pink and purely white. The flowers can also possess various marks and spottings. Other garden-worthy species include D. ferruginea, D. grandiflora, D. lutea, and D. parviflora.

The term digitalis is also used for drug preparations that contain cardiac glycosides, particularly one called digoxin, extracted from various plants of this genus. Foxglove has medicinal uses but is also very toxic to humans and other animals, and consumption can even lead to death.

Etymology
The generic epithet Digitalis is from the Latin digitus (finger). Leonhart Fuchs first invented the name for this plant in his 1542 book De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (Notable comments on the history of plants), based upon the German vernacular name Fingerhut, which translates literally as 'finger hat', but actually means 'thimble'.

The name is recorded in Old English as 'foxes glofe/glofa' or 'fox's glove'. Over time, folk myths obscured the literal origins of the name, insinuating that foxes wore the flowers on their paws to silence their movements as they stealthily hunted their prey. The woody hillsides where the foxes made their dens were often covered with the toxic flowers. Some of the more menacing names, such as "witch's glove", reference the toxicity of the plant.

Henry Fox Talbot (1847) proposed 'folks' glove', where 'folk' means fairy. Similarly, R. C. A. Prior (1863) suggested an etymology of 'foxes-glew', meaning 'fairy music'. However, neither of these suggestions account for the Old English form foxes glofa.

Species
The Flora Europaea originally recognised a number of species now seen as synonyms of Digitalis purpurea, or others: D. dubia, D. leucophaea, D. micrantha and D. trojana. As of 2017, Plants of the World Online recognises the following 27 species (and a number of hybrids):
 * Digitalis atlantica Pomel
 * Digitalis canariensis L.
 * Digitalis cariensis Boiss. ex Jaub. & Spach
 * Digitalis cedretorum (Emb.) Maire
 * Digitalis chalcantha (Svent. & O'Shan.) Albach, Bräuchler & Heubl
 * Digitalis ciliata Trautv.
 * Digitalis davisiana Heywood
 * Digitalis ferruginea L.
 * Digitalis fuscescens Waldst. & Kit.
 * Digitalis grandiflora Mill.
 * Digitalis ikarica (P.H.Davis) Strid
 * Digitalis isabelliana (Webb) Linding.
 * Digitalis laevigata Waldst. & Kit.
 * Digitalis lamarckii Ivanina
 * Digitalis lanata Ehrh.
 * Digitalis lutea L.
 * Digitalis mariana Boiss.
 * Digitalis minor L.
 * Digitalis nervosa Steud. & Hochst. ex Benth.
 * Digitalis obscura L.
 * Digitalis parviflora Jacq.
 * Digitalis purpurea L.
 * Digitalis sceptrum L.f.
 * Digitalis subalpina Braun-Blanq.
 * Digitalis thapsi L.
 * Digitalis transiens Maire
 * Digitalis viridiflora Lindl.

Hybrids

 * Digitalis × coutinhoi Samp.
 * Digitalis × fulva Lindl.
 * Digitalis × macedonica Heywood
 * Digitalis × media Roth
 * Digitalis × pelia Zerbst & Bocquet
 * Digitalis × purpurascens Roth
 * Digitalis × sibirica (Lindley) Werner had been considered a valid species since it was first described by the English botanist and gardener John Lindley in 1821, but it was considered a hybrid of D. grandiflora and D. laevigata by the German botanist Klaus Werner in 1960.

Systematics
The first full monograph regarding this genus was written by Lindley in 1821. He included two sections, a section Isoplexis including two species, and the main section Digitalis with three subsections, including 2Y species, a number of which are now seen as synonyms or hybrids.

In the last full monograph of the genus in 1965, Werner classified the 19 recognised species in five sections (four species from Macaronesia were separated in the genus Isoplexis at the time):
 * In the section Digitalis, along with the type species D. purpurea, four other species (as recognised as the time) were placed: D. thapsi, D. dubia, D. heywoodii and D. mariana.
 * The monotypic section Frutescentes contained only D. obscura.
 * The section Grandiflorae, which was also called section Macranthae by Vernon Hilton Heywood. It included, along with the type species D. grandiflora, also D. atlantica, D. ciliata and D. davisiana.
 * Globiflorae included five species: D. laevigata, D. nervosa, D. ferruginea, D. cariensis and D. lanata.
 * Tubiflorae included four species: D. subalpina, D. lutea, D. viridiflora and D. parviflora.

In their 2000 book about Digitalis, Luckner and Wichtl continued to uphold Werner's classification of the 19 species, but molecular studies into the phylogeny of the genus published in 2004 found that although four of Werner's sections were supported by the genetics, the section Tubiflorae was polyphyletic, and that the species D. lutea and D. viridiflora should be placed in the section Grandiflorae. This study, as well as a number of other studies published around that time, reunited the genus Isoplexis with Digitalis, increasing the number of species to 23.

Peter Hadland Davis, an expert on the flora of Turkey, had used a different circumscription than Werner in his works, and recognised eight species in the country. A 2016 molecular phylogenetic study into the relationships of the Turkish species in the section Globiflorae aimed to reconcile this discrepancy, finding that the classification as proposed by Davis was largely correct: Globiflorae contained as distinct species D. cariensis, D. ferruginea, D. lamarckii, D. lanata and D. nervosa, and D. trojana was subsumed at the infraspecific rank as D. lanata subsp. trojana. This study listed 23 species: D. transiens, D. cedretorum, D. ikarica and D. fuscescens were not mentioned. D. parviflora and D. subalpina were not tested in this study, but the 2004 study found these two species situated within the section Globiflorae.

Ecology
Larvae of the foxglove pug, a moth, consume the flowers of the common foxglove for food. Other species of Lepidoptera eat the leaves, including the lesser yellow underwing. The shape of the foxglove's flowers makes it especially attractive to long-tongued bees, such as the common carder bee. The bright flowers attract the bee, which lands on the lower lip of the bloom before climbing up the tube. This means that the bee is likely to drop any pollen it may have collected from other foxgloves, thereby facilitating propagation.

Historical uses
Nicholas Culpeper included Foxglove in his 1652 herbal medicine guide, The English Physician. He cited its use for healing wounds (both fresh and old), as a purgative, for "the King's Evil" ( mycobacterial cervical lymphadenitis), for "the falling sickness" (epilepsy), and for "a scabby head". There is no empirical evidence for these claims, and it is not used for these conditions in modern medicine, only for slowing excessive heart rate in certain circumstances and/or strengthening heart muscle contraction in heart failure.

Medicinal uses
Digitalis is an example of a drug derived from a plant that was formerly used by herbalists; herbalists have largely abandoned its use because of its narrow therapeutic index and the difficulty of determining the amount of active drug in herbal preparations. Once the usefulness of digitalis in regulating the human pulse was understood, it was employed for a variety of purposes, including the treatment of epilepsy and other seizure disorders, which are now considered to be inappropriate treatments.

A group of medicines extracted from foxglove plants are called digitalin. The use of D. purpurea extract containing cardiac glycosides for the treatment of heart conditions was first described in the English-speaking medical literature by William Withering, in 1785,  which is considered the beginning of modern therapeutics. In contemporary medicine, digitalis (usually digoxin) is obtained from D. lanata. It is used to increase cardiac contractility (it is a positive inotrope) and as an antiarrhythmic agent to control the heart rate, particularly in the irregular (and often fast) atrial fibrillation. Digitalis is hence often prescribed for patients in atrial fibrillation, especially if they have been diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Digoxin was approved for heart failure in 1998 under current regulations by the Food and Drug Administration on the basis of prospective, randomized study and clinical trials. It was also approved for the control of ventricular response rate for patients with atrial fibrillation. American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association guidelines recommend digoxin for symptomatic chronic heart failure for patients with reduced systolic function, preservation of systolic function, and/or rate control for atrial fibrillation with a rapid ventricular response. Heart Failure Society of America guidelines for heart failure provide similar recommendations. Despite its relatively recent approval by the Food and Drug Administration and the guideline recommendations, the therapeutic use of digoxin is declining in patients with heart failure—likely the result of several factors. The main factor is the more recent introduction of several drugs shown in randomised controlled studies to improve outcomes in heart failure. Safety concerns regarding a proposed link between digoxin therapy and increased mortality seen in observational studies may have contributed to the decline in therapeutic use of digoxin, however a systematic review of 75 studies including four million patient years of patient follow-up showed that in properly designed randomised controlled studies, mortality was no higher in patients given digoxin than in those given placebo.

Romani people use foxglove to treat eczema.

Variations
A group of pharmacologically active compounds are extracted mostly from the leaves of the second year's growth, and in pure form are referred to by common chemical names, such as digitoxin or digoxin, or by brand names such as Crystodigin and Lanoxin, respectively. The two drugs differ in that digoxin has an additional hydroxyl group at the C-3 position on the B-ring (adjacent to the pentane). This results in digoxin having a half-life of about one day (and increasing with impaired kidney function), whereas digitoxin's is about 7 days and not affected by kidney function. Both molecules include a lactone and a triple-repeating sugar called a glycoside.

Mechanism of action
Digitalis works by inhibiting sodium-potassium ATPase. This results in an increased intracellular concentration of sodium ions and thus a decreased concentration gradient across the cell membrane. This increase in intracellular sodium causes the Na/Ca exchanger to reverse potential, i.e., transition from pumping sodium into the cell in exchange for pumping calcium out of the cell, to pumping sodium out of the cell in exchange for pumping calcium into the cell. This leads to an increase in cytoplasmic calcium concentration, which improves cardiac contractility. Under normal physiological conditions, the cytoplasmic calcium used in cardiac contractions originates from the sarcoplasmic reticulum, an intracellular organelle that stores calcium. Human newborns, some animals, and patients with chronic heart failure lack well developed and fully functioning sarcoplasmic reticula and must rely on the Na/Ca exchanger to provide all or a majority of the cytoplasmic calcium required for cardiac contraction. For this to occur, cytoplasmic sodium must exceed its typical concentration to favour a reversal in potential, which naturally occurs in human newborns and some animals primarily through an elevated heart rate; in patients with chronic heart failure it occurs through the administration of digitalis. As a result of increased contractility, stroke volume is increased. Ultimately, digitalis increases cardiac output (cardiac output = stroke volume x heart rate). This is the mechanism that makes this drug a popular treatment for congestive heart failure, which is characterized by low cardiac output.

Digitalis also has a vagal effect on the parasympathetic nervous system, and can be used to slow the ventricular rate during atrial fibrillation (unless there's an accessory pathway, when it can paradoxically increase the heart rate). The dependence on the vagal effect means digitalis is not effective when a patient has a high sympathetic nervous system drive, which is the case with acutely ill persons, and also during exercise.

Molecular probes
Digoxigenin (DIG) is a steroid found in the flowers and leaves of Digitalis species, and is extracted from D. lanata. Digoxigenin can be used as a molecular probe to detect mRNA in situ and label DNA, RNA, and oligonucleotides. It can easily be attached to nucleotides such as uridine by chemical modifications. DIG molecules are often linked to nucleotides; DIG-labelled uridine can then be incorporated into RNA via in vitro transcription. Once hybridisation occurs, RNA with the incorporated DIG-U can be detected with anti-DIG antibodies conjugated to alkaline phosphatase. To reveal the hybridised transcripts, a chromogen can be used which reacts with the alkaline phosphatase to produce a coloured precipitate.

Toxicity

Depending on the species, the digitalis plant may contain several deadly physiological and chemically related cardiac and steroidal glycosides. Thus, the digitalis plants have earned several, more sinister, names: dead man's bells and witch's gloves. The toxins can be absorbed via the skin or ingestion.

Digitalis intoxication, known as digitalism, results from an overdose of digitalis and can cause gastrointestinal, cardiac and neurological effects. The former include appetite loss, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea; the cardiac symptoms include both tachycardia, and bradycardia (either of which, if severe enough, can result in syncope—see below); and the neurological effects include fatigue, delirium, and rarely xanthopsia (jaundiced or yellow vision). Other oculotoxic effects of digitalis include generalized blurry vision, as well as the appearance of blurred outlines ('halos'). Other things mentioned are dilated pupils, drooling, weakness, collapse, seizures, and even death.

Digitalis poisoning can cause indirect inhibition of the atrioventricular node via a direct effect on the vagal nucleus. This results in bradycardia (decreased heart rate) or if severe enough, heart block. The direct effect of cardiac glycosides on heart muscle cells is to increase contraction of the cells, both in force and frequency, tending to produce tachycardia (increased heart rate), depending on the dose, the condition of one's heart, and the prevailing chemistry of the blood (specifically any of: low potassium, high calcium and low magnesium). Electrical cardioversion (to "shock" the heart) is generally not indicated in ventricular fibrillation in digitalis toxicity, as it can make the rhythm disturbance more complicated or sustained. Furthermore, the classic drug of choice for ventricular fibrillation in emergency setting, amiodarone, can worsen the dysrhythmia caused by digitalis, therefore, the second-choice drug lidocaine is more commonly used. Mild toxicity is treated by stopping the medication and general supportive measures; severe toxicity is treated with anti-digoxin antibody fragments.

The entire plant is toxic (including the roots and seeds). Mortality is rare, but case reports do exist. Most plant exposures occur in children younger than six years and are usually unintentional and without associated significant toxicity. More serious toxicity occurs with intentional ingestion by adolescents and adults.

In some instances, people have confused foxglove with the relatively harmless comfrey (Symphytum) plant, which is sometimes brewed into a tea, with fatal consequences. Other fatal accidents involve children drinking the water in a vase containing digitalis plants. Drying does not reduce the toxicity of the plant. The plant is toxic to animals, including all classes of livestock and poultry, as well as felines and canines.

In popular culture
According to 1981 speculation, Vincent van Gogh's "Yellow Period" may have been influenced by digitalis, because it had been proposed as a therapy to control epilepsy around this time, and there are two paintings by the artist where the plant is present. Other studies immediately questioned this: there are a large number of other possible explanations for van Gogh's choice of palette, there is no evidence that van Gogh was ever given the drug or that his physician prescribed it, he was tested and had no xanthopsia, and in his many letters of the time he makes it clear that he simply liked using the colour yellow, but it has remained a popular theory.

title: Digitalis


text:
Dendrite

A dendrite (from Greek δένδρον déndron, "tree") or dendron is a branched protoplasmic extension of a nerve cell that propagates the electrochemical stimulation received from other neural cells to the cell body, or soma, of the neuron from which the dendrites project. Electrical stimulation is transmitted onto dendrites by upstream neurons (usually via their axons) via synapses which are located at various points throughout the dendritic tree.

Dendrites play a critical role in integrating these synaptic inputs and in determining the extent to which action potentials are produced by the neuron.

Structure and function
Dendrites are one of two types of protoplasmic protrusions that extrude from the cell body of a neuron, the other type being an axon. Axons can be distinguished from dendrites by several features including shape, length, and function. Dendrites often taper off in shape and are shorter, while axons tend to maintain a constant radius and can be very long. Typically, axons transmit electrochemical signals and dendrites receive the electrochemical signals, although some types of neurons in certain species lack specialized axons and transmit signals via their dendrites. Dendrites provide an enlarged surface area to receive signals from axon terminals of other neurons. The dendrite of a large pyramidal cell receives signals from about 30,000 presynaptic neurons. Excitatory synapses terminate on dendritic spines, tiny protrusions from the dendrite with a high density of neurotransmitter receptors. Most inhibitory synapses directly contact the dendritic shaft.

Synaptic activity causes local changes in the electrical potential across the plasma membrane of the dendrite. This change in membrane potential will passively spread along the dendrite, but becomes weaker with distance without an action potential. To generate an action potential, many excitatory synapses have to be active at the same time, leading to strong depolarization of the dendrite and the cell body (soma). The action potential, which typically starts at the axon hillock, propagates down the length of the axon to the axon terminals where it triggers the release of neurotransmitters, but also backwards into the dendrite (retrograde propagation), providing an important signal for spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP).

Most synapses are axodendritic, involving an axon signaling to a dendrite. There are also dendrodendritic synapses, signaling from one dendrite to another. An autapse is a synapse in which the axon of one neuron transmits signals to its own dendrite.

The general structure of the dendrite is used to classify neurons into multipolar, bipolar and unipolar types. Multipolar neurons are composed of one axon and many dendritic trees. Pyramidal cells are multipolar cortical neurons with pyramid-shaped cell bodies and large dendrites that extend towards the surface of the cortex (apical dendrite). Bipolar neurons have two main dendrites at opposing ends of the cell body. Many inhibitory neurons have this morphology. Unipolar neurons, typical for insects, have a stalk that extends from the cell body that separates into two branches with one containing the dendrites and the other with the terminal buttons. In vertebrates, sensory neurons detecting touch or temperature are unipolar. Dendritic branching can be extensive and in some cases is sufficient to receive as many as 100,000 inputs to a single neuron.

History
The term dendrites was first used in 1889 by Wilhelm His to describe the number of smaller "protoplasmic processes" that were attached to a nerve cell. German anatomist Otto Friedrich Karl Deiters is generally credited with the discovery of the axon by distinguishing it from the dendrites.

Some of the first intracellular recordings in a nervous system were made in the late 1930s by Kenneth S. Cole and Howard J. Curtis. Swiss Rüdolf Albert von Kölliker and German Robert Remak were the first to identify and characterize the axonal initial segment. Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley also employed the squid giant axon (1939) and by 1952 they had obtained a full quantitative description of the ionic basis of the action potential, leading the formulation of the Hodgkin–Huxley model. Hodgkin and Huxley were awarded jointly the Nobel Prize for this work in 1963. The formulas detailing axonal conductance were extended to vertebrates in the Frankenhaeuser–Huxley equations. Louis-Antoine Ranvier was the first to describe the gaps or nodes found on axons and for this contribution these axonal features are now commonly referred to as the Nodes of Ranvier. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish anatomist, proposed that axons were the output components of neurons. He also proposed that neurons were discrete cells that communicated with each other via specialized junctions, or spaces, between cells, now known as a synapse. Ramón y Cajal improved a silver staining process known as Golgi's method, which had been developed by his rival, Camillo Golgi.

Dendrite development
During the development of dendrites, several factors can influence differentiation. These include modulation of sensory input, environmental pollutants, body temperature, and drug use. For example, rats raised in dark environments were found to have a reduced number of spines in pyramidal cells located in the primary visual cortex and a marked change in distribution of dendrite branching in layer 4 stellate cells. Experiments done in vitro and in vivo have shown that the presence of afferents and input activity per se can modulate the patterns in which dendrites differentiate.

Little is known about the process by which dendrites orient themselves in vivo and are compelled to create the intricate branching pattern unique to each specific neuronal class. One theory on the mechanism of dendritic arbor development is the Synaptotropic Hypothesis. The synaptotropic hypothesis proposes that input from a presynaptic to a postsynaptic cell (and maturation of excitatory synaptic inputs) eventually can change the course of synapse formation at dendritic and axonal arbors.

This synapse formation is required for the development of neuronal structure in the functioning brain. A balance between metabolic costs of dendritic elaboration and the need to cover receptive field presumably determine the size and shape of dendrites. A complex array of extracellular and intracellular cues modulates dendrite development including transcription factors, receptor-ligand interactions, various signaling pathways, local translational machinery, cytoskeletal elements, Golgi outposts and endosomes. These contribute to the organization of the dendrites on individual cell bodies and the placement of these dendrites in the neuronal circuitry. For example, it was shown that β-actin zipcode binding protein 1 (ZBP1) contributes to proper dendritic branching.

Other important transcription factors involved in the morphology of dendrites include CUT, Abrupt, Collier, Spineless, ACJ6/drifter, CREST, NEUROD1, CREB, NEUROG2 etc. Secreted proteins and cell surface receptors includes neurotrophins and tyrosine kinase receptors, BMP7, Wnt/dishevelled, EPHB 1–3, Semaphorin/plexin-neuropilin, slit-robo, netrin-frazzled, reelin. Rac, CDC42 and RhoA serve as cytoskeletal regulators and the motor protein includes KIF5, dynein, LIS1. Dendritic arborization has been found to be induced in cerebellum Purkinje cells by substance P. Important secretory and endocytic pathways controlling the dendritic development include DAR3 /SAR1, DAR2/Sec23, DAR6/Rab1 etc. All these molecules interplay with each other in controlling dendritic morphogenesis including the acquisition of type specific dendritic arborization, the regulation of dendrite size and the organization of dendrites emanating from different neurons.

Types of dendritic patterns
Dendritic arborization, also known as dendritic branching, is a multi-step biological process by which neurons form new dendritic trees and branches to create new synapses. Dendrites in many organisms assume different morphological patterns of branching. The morphology of dendrites such as branch density and grouping patterns are highly correlated to the function of the neuron. Malformation of dendrites is also tightly correlated to impaired nervous system function.

Branching morphologies may assume an adendritic structure (not having a branching structure, or not tree-like), or a tree-like radiation structure. Tree-like arborization patterns can be spindled (where two dendrites radiate from opposite poles of a cell body with few branches, see bipolar neurons ), spherical (where dendrites radiate in a part or in all directions from a cell body, see cerebellar granule cells), laminar (where dendrites can either radiate planarly, offset from cell body by one or more stems, or multi-planarly, see retinal horizontal cells, retinal ganglion cells, retinal amacrine cells respectively), cylindrical (where dendrites radiate in all directions in a cylinder, disk-like fashion, see pallidal neurons), conical (dendrites radiate like a cone away from cell body, see pyramidal cells), or fanned (where dendrites radiate like a flat fan as in Purkinje cells).

Electrical properties
The structure and branching of a neuron's dendrites, as well as the availability and variation of voltage-gated ion conductance, strongly influences how the neuron integrates the input from other neurons. This integration is both temporal, involving the summation of stimuli that arrive in rapid succession, as well as spatial, entailing the aggregation of excitatory and inhibitory inputs from separate branches.

Dendrites were once thought to merely convey electrical stimulation passively. This passive transmission means that voltage changes measured at the cell body are the result of activation of distal synapses propagating the electric signal towards the cell body without the aid of voltage-gated ion channels. Passive cable theory describes how voltage changes at a particular location on a dendrite transmit this electrical signal through a system of converging dendrite segments of different diameters, lengths, and electrical properties. Based on passive cable theory one can track how changes in a neuron's dendritic morphology impacts the membrane voltage at the cell body, and thus how variation in dendrite architectures affects the overall output characteristics of the neuron.

Action potentials initiated at the axon hillock propagate back into the dendritic arbor. These back-propagating action potentials depolarize the dendritic membrane and provide a crucial signal for synapse modulation and long-term potentiation. Back-propagation is not completely passive, but modulated by the presence of dendritic voltage-gated potassium channels. Furthermore, in certain types of neurons, a train of back-propagating action potentials can induce a calcium action potential (a dendritic spike) at dendritic initiation zones.

Plasticity
Dendrites themselves appear to be capable of plastic changes during the adult life of animals, including invertebrates. Neuronal dendrites have various compartments known as functional units that are able to compute incoming stimuli. These functional units are involved in processing input and are composed of the subdomains of dendrites such as spines, branches, or groupings of branches. Therefore, plasticity that leads to changes in the dendrite structure will affect communication and processing in the cell. During development, dendrite morphology is shaped by intrinsic programs within the cell's genome and extrinsic factors such as signals from other cells. But in adult life, extrinsic signals become more influential and cause more significant changes in dendrite structure compared to intrinsic signals during development. In females, the dendritic structure can change as a result of physiological conditions induced by hormones during periods such as pregnancy, lactation, and following the estrous cycle. This is particularly visible in pyramidal cells of the CA1 region of the hippocampus, where the density of dendrites can vary up to 30%.

Recent experimental observations suggest that adaptation is performed in the neuronal dendritic trees, where the timescale of adaptation was observed to be as low as several seconds only. Certain machine learning architectures based on dendritic trees have shown to simplify the learning algorithm without affecting performance.

title: Dendrite