Definition of "branchless"

Gentle Octavia,Let your best love draw to that point, which seeksBest to preserve it: if I lose mine honour,I lose myself: better I were not yoursThan yours so branchless.

c. 1606–1607, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Anthonie and Cleopatra”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act III, scene iv]

A mile and a half from town, I came to a grove of tall cocoa-nut trees, with clean, branchless stems reaching straight up sixty or seventy feet and topped with a spray of green foliage sheltering clusters of cocoa-nuts—not more picturesque than a forest of colossal ragged parasols, with bunches of magnified grapes under them, would be.

1866, Mark Twain, “Equestrian Excursion,” March, 1886, in Letters from the Sandwich Islands Written for the Sacramento Union by Mark Twain,, Stanford University Press, 1938, p. 40

One long, clear, branchless line indicates great distinction in some one thing; but if dividing into branches, or accompanied by parallel lines of strength equal to its own, there is danger that multiplicity of aims will strangle success.

1886, [Henry H. Sweet], Palmistry; or, the Science of Reading the Past, Present and Future, in the Language of the Hands, New York: The Serial Leaflet Publishing Co., p. 21

“ […] At the end of this corridor I shall come to a spiral runway which I must follow down instead of up; after that the way is along but a single branchless corridor.”

1913 December – 1914 March, Edgar Rice Burroughs, chapter 15, in The Warlord of Mars, Chicago, Ill.: A[lexander] C[aldwell] McClurg & Co., published September 1919

These days it looks as though more Americans than ever are willing to let go. They are traveling through coinless tollbooths, banking at branchless banks, riding in tokenless subways and paying for everything from taxi rides to mortgages with the swipe of a card or the blip of an electronic transfer.

1994 November 9, Thomas McCarroll, “No Checks. No Cash. No Fuss?”, in Time