Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • transitive & intransitive verb To form or collect into a rounded mass.
  • adjective Gathered into a rounded mass.
  • noun A confused or jumbled mass; a heap.
  • noun A volcanic rock consisting of rounded and angular fragments fused together.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To collect or gather into a mass.
  • To gather, grow, or collect into a ball or mass: as, “hard, agglomerating salts,”
  • Gathered into a ball or mass; piled together; specifically, in botany, crowded into a dense cluster, but not cohering.
  • noun A fortuitous mass or assemblage of things; an agglomeration.
  • noun In geology, an accumulation of materials made up chiefly of large blocks “huddled together in a pell-mell way, without regard to size, shape, or weight.”

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • intransitive verb To collect in a mass.
  • transitive verb To wind or collect into a ball; hence, to gather into a mass or anything like a mass.
  • noun A collection or mass.
  • noun (Geol.) A mass of angular volcanic fragments united by heat; -- distinguished from conglomerate.
  • adjective Collected into a ball, heap, or mass.
  • adjective (Bot.) Collected into a rounded head of flowers.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Collected into a ball, heap, or mass.
  • noun A collection or mass.
  • noun geology A mass of angular volcanic fragments united by heat; distinguished from conglomerate.
  • noun meteorology An ice cover of floe formed by the freezing together of various forms of ice.
  • verb To wind or collect into a ball; hence, to gather into a mass or anything like a mass.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective clustered together but not coherent
  • noun volcanic rock consisting of large fragments fused together
  • noun a collection of objects laid on top of each other
  • verb form into one cluster

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin agglomerāre, agglomerāt-, to mass together : ad-, ad- + glomerāre, to form into a ball (from glomus, glomer-, ball).]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

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").

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