excrescence
English edit
Etymology edit
From Middle English, early 15th century, in sense “(action of) growing out (of something else)”. Borrowed from Latin excrescentia (“abnormal growths”), from excrescentem, from excrēscere, from ex- (“out”) (English ex-) + crēscere (“to grow”) (English crescent). Sense of “abnormal growth” from 1570s, from earlier excrescency (1540s in this sense).[1]
Pronunciation edit
Noun edit
excrescence (plural excrescences)
- Something, usually abnormal, which grows out of something else.
- 1847 October 16, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], chapter VII, in Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. […], volumes (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC:
- I have again and again intimated that I desire the hair to be arranged closely, modestly, plainly. Miss Temple, that girl’s hair must be cut off entirely; I will send a barber to-morrow: and I see others who have far too much of the excrescence—that tall girl, tell her to turn round.
- 1903 July, Jack London, “The Sounding of the Call”, in The Call of the Wild, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., →OCLC, page 219:
- The squirrels were in hiding. One only he saw,—a sleek gray fellow, flattened against a gray dead limb so that he seemed a part of it, a woody excrescence upon the wood itself.
- 1907 April, E[dward] M[organ] Forster, chapter XXXIII, in The Longest Journey, Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, part III (Wiltshire), page 336:
- Perhaps he meant that towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
- 1933 January 9, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter XXXI, in Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Victor Gollancz […], →OCLC, page 234:
- It is taken for granted that a beggar does not 'earn' his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic 'earns' his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.
- A disfiguring or unwanted mark or adjunct.
- (phonetics) The epenthesis of a consonant, e.g., warmth as [ˈwɔrmpθ] (adding a [p] between [m] and [θ]), or -t (Etymology 2).
- Synonym: vyanjanabhakti
- Antonyms: svarabhakti, anaptyxis
- Hypernym: epenthesis
Hyponyms edit
- (phonetic): linking consonant
Related terms edit
Translations edit
something, usually abnormal, which grows out of something else
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epenthesis of a consonant
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See also edit
- (phonetic): intervocalic
References edit
- ^ Douglas Harper (2001–2024) “excrescence”, in Online Etymology Dictionary.