inosculate

present singular third person inosculates · participle present inosculating · participle past inosculated · past inosculated

1. transitiveTo homogenize; to make continuous.

   Synonyms: blend, blend, fuse, homogenize, uniformize

2. intransitiveTo open into.

   The party left the town of Martaban on the 20th March; they passed two grassy and level islands just above the junction of the Gyein river with the main one. […] This inosculating river is about half the breadth of the Sanloon.

   1826 November 28, “Survey of the River Sanloon”, in The Asiatic Journal, volume 22, number 131, page 550

3. raretransitiveTo unite.

   1 more example

   Clouds sometimes inosculate with smoke. Howard mentions several cases in his Journals. "The smoke of London," he observes, "when passing away in a body swelled up into distinct heaps, each of which inosculated at its summit with a small Cloud. Groups of Cumulo Stratus, the Cumulus and Cirro Stratus occupied the South part of the sky attracting smoke."

   1834, George Harvey, “On Clouds”, in A Treatise on Meteorology, page 161

   Synonyms: interosculate, affix, attach, join, put together, accouple, affix, assemble

4. intransitiveTo intercommunicate; to interjoin.

   1 more example

   But that, alas! is impossible. Hearken to the nature of the fix in which I find myself, and say if you ever heard of a worse. Under ordinary circumstances, if one outruns the usual allowance of space, one has but to say at the foot of the paper, To be continued, and all is healed. Any paper may be adjourned from month to month,—true, but not from volume to volume; and, unhappily for me, this very week's number, in which I am now writing, closes a volume. The several monthly divisions of the journal may inosculate, but not the several volumes.

   1852, Thomas De Quincey, “Sir William Hamilton”, in Hogg's Weekly Instructor, volume 8, Edinburgh: James Hogg, page 404; reprinted in The Collected Writings Of Thomas De Quincey, volume 5, London: A & C Black, 1897, page 316

comparative more inosculate · superlative most inosculate

1. Pertaining to or characterized by inosculation.

   This study proposes to trace the inosculate nature of the mask theme in Nietzsche's philosophy.

   1983, Dissertation Abstracts International: The humanities and social sciences

   3 more examples

   However, not all physicians of that age were convinced about the inosculate nature of these diseases, and debate continued unabated until the tragic self-experimentation of John Hunter in 1767.

   1971, Frederick Tice, Tice's practice of medicine - Volume 3

   The choice between normal, inverse, and inosculate strategies required some attention if only to emphasize the difference between the inosculate approach and much early work on numerical taxonomy.

   1973, Australian Journal of Botany, page 272

   The trunks of inosculate, or self-grafting, trees, such as Elm, Live Oak, and Dogwood, are the load-bearing structure, and the branches from a continuous lattice frame for the walls and roof.

   2005, Kjersti Monson, Alex Duval, Emily Abruzzo, 306090 08: Autonomous Urbanism, →ISBN