Definitions

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

  • noun The act or process of agglutinating; adhesion of distinct parts.
  • noun A clumped mass of material formed by agglutination.
  • noun Physiology The clumping together of red blood cells or bacteria, usually in response to a particular antibody.
  • noun Linguistics The formation of words from morphemes that retain their original forms and meanings with little change during the combination process.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of uniting by glue or other tenacious substance; the state of being thus united; adhesion of parts; that which is united; a mass or group cemented together.
  • noun In philology, the condition of being agglutinate; the process or result of agglutinate combination. See agglutinate, a.
  • noun In Wundt's psychology, the simplest type of apperceptive connection of ideas: a connection in which one is still clearly conscious of the constituent ideas, while the total idea aroused by their conjunction is nevertheless unitary: for example, watch-tower, steamboat.
  • noun In bacteriology, the clumping or coalescence of red blood-corpuscles or bacteria brought about by the action of special agglutinating substances (agglutinins).

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

  • noun The act of uniting by glue or other tenacious substance; the state of being thus united; adhesion of parts.
  • noun (Physiol.) Combination in which root words are united with little or no change of form or loss of meaning. See Agglutinative, 2.

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

  • noun The act of uniting by glue or other tenacious substance; the state of being thus united; adhesion of parts.
  • noun Combination in which root words are united with little or no change of form or loss of meaning. See agglutinative.
  • noun The clumping together of red blood cells or bacteria, usually in response to a particular antibody.

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

  • noun a clumping of bacteria or red cells when held together by antibodies (agglutinins)
  • noun the building of words from component morphemes that retain their form and meaning in the process of combining
  • noun the coalescing of small particles that are suspended in solution; these larger masses are then (usually) precipitated

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Thus, it will be observed, a number of parts of words are taken and thrown together, by a process which has been happily termed agglutination, so as to form one word, conveying a complicated idea.

    Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation Robert Chambers 1836

  • They clump together cells bearing antigens (e.g., bacteria and [[erythrocyte]] s) in a process called '' 'agglutination' ''.

    Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium - Recent changes [en] 2008

  • His last Tweet recommends a fatuous Robert Kaplan op-ed contending that the Muslim world is one undistinguishable agglutination of grievance.

    A World Brimming Frozen Over With Overexposure | ATTACKERMAN 2008

  • Semen samples that show sperm clumping agglutination of one sperm head to another or one tail to another usually signal the presence of an infection or antisperm antibodies.

    A Baby at Last! Mark L. Fuerst 2010

  • Fewer agencies are more of a mess than DHS, a Frankenstein-like agglutination of 170,000 federal employees from different bureaucratic and law-enforcement cultures, transformed into a hive of incompetence and cronyism under Bush.

    Brooklyn, Stand Up! | ATTACKERMAN 2008

  • Thus I think we now have a sensible solution to the reconstruction of the Old IE objective endings preceding the agglutination of “indicative” postclitic demonstrative *əi PIE *-i:

    The trouble with the PIE 1st & 2nd person plural endings (3) 2008

  • Thus I think we now have a sensible solution to the reconstruction of the Old IE objective endings preceding the agglutination of “indicative” postclitic demonstrative *əi PIE *-i:

    Archive 2008-10-01 2008

  • This agglutination is precisely what obscured the original penultimate accent of the bare nominative singular, making it now a word accented on the antepenultimate syllable third-to-last syllable.

    Sporadic phonetic changes in the Indo-European case system 2008

  • And I haven't even explained case agglutination yet e.g. -clel from locative -cle plus genitive -l.

    Enclitics and noun phrases in Etruscan 2007

  • And that this approach leads to a more elegant and internally consistent programming language ("crystallization of style"), rather than a mix of human memory intensive bits and pieces ("agglutination of features")

    Archive 2007-09-01 Bill Kerr 2007

Comments

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  • noun: a clumped mass of material formed by agglutination.

    June 29, 2007

  • Sounds like oatmeal to me.

    June 30, 2007

  • Yes, oatmeal is agglutinous, isn't it.

    June 30, 2007

  • Why do they agglutinate their words?

    That's nobodies business but the Turks.

    June 30, 2007

  • Stumped again, seanahan. I think that there is a referent that I don't get. Turks?

    June 30, 2007

  • The Turkish language is agglutanative.

    The rest is a reference to the They Might Be Giants song.

    June 30, 2007

  • Thanks. This is wonderful fun. Is the German method of forming nouns also agglutinative? And are portmanteau words also an example of agglutination? I love to learn about language formation/evolution.

    June 30, 2007

  • German is not considered an agglutinative language. I don't think portmanteaus are either. I'm not entirely clear on why though. I'll have to do some more reading.

    July 1, 2007

  • Yeah, I think even though German isn't considered an agglutinative language like Finnish or Turkish, the way it forms nouns is agglutinative. It just refers to how many morphemes you can smash into one lexical unit. Right?

    July 1, 2007

  • JM is attempting the proidentificationment of the health food of the agglutination.

    February 14, 2010