agglomerate

comparative more agglomerate · superlative most agglomerate

1. collected into a ball, heap, or mass

   Synonyms: agglomerated

plural agglomerates

1. A collection or mass.

   Synonyms: agglomeration, collection, mass

2. geographyA mass of angular volcanic fragments united by heat; distinguished from conglomerate.
3. climatologyAn ice cover of floe formed by the freezing together of various forms of ice.

present singular third person agglomerates · participle present agglomerating · participle past agglomerated · past agglomerated

1. ambitransitiveTo wind or collect into a ball; hence, to gather into a mass or anything like a mass.

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

   2009, Peter Campion, “Imperium”, in The Lions, University of Chicago Press, page 14

   3 more examples

   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.

   1789, William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye: and Several Parts of South Wales, 2nd edition, London: R. Blamire, Section 10, p. 122

   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.

   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.

   1937, Claude McKay, chapter 3, in A Long Way from Home, New York: Arno Press, published 1969, page 35

   Synonyms: ball, ball up, bundle up, clew, conglobate, conglobe, globe, orb

2. geographyTo 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).