Agglomerate

Quick meaning: Agglomerate is an adjective meaning collected into a ball, heap, or mass.

Meaning

collected into a ball, heap, or mass.

More Meanings

1. A collection or mass.
2. (geology, volcanology) A mass of angular volcanic fragments united by heat; distinguished from conglomerate.
3. (meteorology) An ice cover of floe formed by the freezing together of various forms of ice.
4. (ambitransitive) To wind or collect into a ball; hence, to gather into a mass or anything like a mass.
5. (geography) To extend an urban area by contiguous development, so as to merge the built-up area of one or more central cities or settlements and their suburbs (thus creating an agglomeration).

Example Sentences

It feels like doing eighty on the freeway / as little towns agglomerate and blur:

There were few white friends in the social life of the peasants. The white colony agglomerated in the towns and the peasants were 80 per cent of a population of a million.

The bustle of a croud is not ill-adapted to the pencil: but the management of it requires great artifice. The whole must be massed together, and considered as one body. ¶ I mean not to have the whole body so agglomerated, as to consist of no detached groups: but to have these groups […] appear to belong to one whole, by the artifice of composition, and the effect of light.

1820, William Hazlitt, “Explanations—Conversation on the Drama with Coleridge” in Dramatic Essays London: Scott, 1895, p. 197, His [Jean Racine’s] tragedies are not poetry, are not passion, are not imagination: they are a parcel of set speeches, of epigrammatic conceits, of declamatory phrases, without any of the glow, and glancing rapidity, and principle of fusion in the mind of the poet, to agglomerate them into grandeur, or blend them into harmony.

Word Forms

• agglomerates
• agglomerating
• agglomerated

Synonyms for agglomerate

Depending on context, synonyms include agglomerated, agglomeration, collection, mass, ball, ball up.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include agglomerative, clustered, collective, andesitic, tuffs, cumulate.

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