Wiktionary

agglomerate

English edit

Alternative forms edit

Etymology edit

From Latin agglomerare (“to wind into a ball”), from ad (“to”) + glomerare (“to wind into a ball”), from glomus (“a ball”), akin to globus (“a ball”).

Pronunciation edit

Adjective edit

agglomerate (comparative more agglomerate, superlative most agglomerate)

  1. collected into a ball, heap, or mass

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Translations

Noun edit

agglomerate (plural agglomerates)

  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.

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Translations edit

Verb edit

agglomerate (third-person singular simple present agglomerates, present participle agglomerating, simple past and past participle agglomerated)

  1. (transitive, intransitive) To wind or collect into a ball; hence, to gather into a mass or anything like a mass.
    • 1789, William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye: and Several Parts of South Wales‎[1], 2nd edition, London: R. Blamire, Section 10, p. 122:
      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,[2]
      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.
    • 1937, Claude McKay, chapter 3, in A Long Way from Home‎[3], New York: Arno Press, published 1969, page 35:
      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.
    • 2009, Peter Campion, “Imperium”, in The Lions, University of Chicago Press, page 14:
      It feels like doing eighty on the freeway / as little towns agglomerate and blur:
  2. (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).

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Related terms edit

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Translations

Further reading edit

Italian edit

Etymology 1 edit

Verb edit

agglomerate

  1. inflection of agglomerare:
    1. second-person plural present indicative
    2. second-person plural imperative

Etymology 2 edit

Participle edit

agglomerate f pl

  1. feminine plural of agglomerato

Latin edit

Verb edit

agglomerāte

  1. second-person plural present active imperative of agglomerō
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