consolidation

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

• noun The act or process of consolidating.
• noun The state of being consolidated.
• noun The merger of two or more commercial interests or corporations.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The act of making or the process of becoming solid, firm, or stable; the act of forming into a more firm or compact mass, body, or system.
• noun The act of bringing together and uniting several particulars, details, or parts into one body or whole.
• noun The act of confirming or ratifying; confirmation; ratification.
• noun In civil law, the uniting of the possession or profit of land with the property.
• noun In Scots feudal law, the reunion of the property with the superiority, after they have been feudally disjoined.
• noun In botany, same as adnation.
• noun In geology, the mechanical process by which separated parts of a rock are brought closer together through pressure.
• noun In finance, the combining of two or more sources of revenue into a common fund, or of varied forms of public indebtedness into a stock bearing interest at a uniform rate.

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

• noun The act or process of consolidating, making firm, or uniting; the state of being consolidated; solidification; combination.
• noun (Bot.) To organic cohesion of different circled in a flower; adnation.
• noun (Law) The combination of several actions into one.

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

• noun The act or process of consolidating, making firm, or uniting; the state of being consolidated; solidification; combination.
• noun The combination of several actions into one.
• noun medicine A solidification into a firm dense mass. It is usually applied to induration (swelling or hardening of normally soft tissue) of a normally aerated lung.

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

• noun something that has consolidated into a compact mass
• noun combining into a solid mass
• noun the act of combining into an integral whole