accretion
Noun
Meaning
The act of increasing by natural growth; esp. the increase of organic bodies by the internal accession of parts; organic growth.
The act of increasing, or the matter added, by an accession of parts externally; an extraneous addition; as, an accretion of earth.
Concretion; coherence of separate particles; as, the accretion of particles so as to form a solid mass.
A growing together of parts naturally separate, as of the fingers toes.
The adhering of property to something else, by which the owner of one thing becomes possessed of a right to another; generally, gain of land by the washing up of sand or sail from the sea or a river, or by a gradual recession of the water from the usual watermark.
Gain to an heir or legatee, failure of a coheir to the same succession, or a co-legatee of the same thing, to take his share.
Source: Webster's dictionarySynonyms
Antonyms
Show all antonymsHypernyms
Hyponyms
Related terms
Phrases with the word
Anagrams
Examples
The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion.
Nothing happens quite by chance. It's a question of accretion of information and experience.
It doesn't matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.
She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind - or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.
Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.
Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific development as a process of accretion.