Quote Originally Posted by Clear View Post
ab新orb: Take in or soak up (energy, or a liquid or other substance) by chemical or physical action, typically gradually.

re新orb: Absorb (something) again.

Both definitions taken from google. Snakes do not resorb, they absorb. Resorb would mean they formed follicles, absorbed them, formed more follicles and resorbed them also.

You took only the first definition from Google, and ignored the second:

2. Biology To dissolve and assimilate (bone tissue, for example).

... I'm not arguing that the roots of the word could be construed as redundant, but resorb IS a term in biology for the dissolution and assimilation of a bodily structure.

If you do a Google search for "oocyte resorption" or "follicle resorption," you will get multiple hits of academic papers discussing the exact phenomenon referenced in this thread.

If you do a Google search for "oocyte absorption" or "follicle absorption," you don't get anything meaningful as this is not the commonly used term for this phenomenon.

I believe that the etymology of this is that "absorption" would imply the assimilation of substances from outside the body, while "resorption" indicates that the substances comprising the structure being dissolved originated from the body and are simply being re-assimilated.