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Accretion   Listen
noun
accretion  n.  
1.
The act of increasing by natural growth; esp. the increase of organic bodies by the internal accession of parts; organic growth.
2.
The act of increasing, or the matter added, by an accession of parts externally; an extraneous addition; as, an accretion of earth. "A mineral... augments not by growth, but by accretion." "To strip off all the subordinate parts of his narrative as a later accretion."
3.
Concretion; coherence of separate particles; as, the accretion of particles so as to form a solid mass.
4.
A growing together of parts naturally separate, as of the fingers or toes.
5.
(Law)
(a)
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 soil from the sea or a river, or by a gradual recession of the water from the usual watermark.
(b)
Gain to an heir or legatee, by failure of a coheir to the same succession, or a co-legatee of the same thing, to take his share.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Accretion" Quotes from Famous Books



... 4th) and the two following days, the requested reinforcements, in number some 1,500 men of all arms, arrived. With this accretion of strength it was now possible to renew the offensive, and General French at once turned his attention to the capture of Grassy Hill (Suffolk Hill on map No. 16), which he had early marked as the key to the Boer stronghold. This height lay at the junction of the roads leading ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice

... day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions. 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 ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... into smaller specialized sections without losing its continuity for its broader and perhaps vaguer work. At the same time, specialized bodies with related aims have been partially or wholly absorbed, until, by processes partly of subdivision and partly of accretion, we have a body capable of dealing alike with the general and the special problems of library work. It should not be forgotten, however, that its success in dealing with both kinds of problems is still conditioned by the laws already laid down. The general association, as it grows larger, will ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... alluvial gold, in great pure masses, mammillary, or botryoidal (like a bunch of grapes) in shape, have assuredly been formed by accretion on some metallic base, from gold salts in solution, ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson

... had been fifty miles out of Wheeling. The quaint American town was his world: he brought the world into it. There were relics of old Indian forts and mounds, the old times and the new. The people, too, though the cobbler only dimly saw that, were as much the deposit and accretion of all dead ages as was the coal that lay bedded in the fencing hills. Irish, Dutch, whites, blacks, Moors, old John Bull himself: you can find the dregs of every day of the world in any mill-town of the States. Adam had a dull perception ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... guarding; something impalpable and yet immensely solid; something not to be defied or laughed away because inexplicable, but venerable precisely because it could not be explained; something not fashioned hastily upon reason, but built by slow accretion, with the years for its builders—mortared by sentiments, memories, traditions, decencies, trivialities good and bad, even (may be) by the blood of foolish quarrels—but founded and welded more firmly, massed more formidably, than any structure of mere reason; and withal a temple wherein she, ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... of evolution. He had to represent a series of changes as taking place in the individual which can only be conceived as the product of a long and complex social change. He is forced to represent the growth of morality as an accretion of new 'ends' due to association, not as an intrinsic development of the character itself. He has to make morality out of atomic sensations and ideas collected in clusters and trains without any distinct reference to the organic constitution of the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... generation became lazier and there's no one alive who can keep this Central System in proper working order." He leaned forward to emphasize his point. "You see, it's very slowly breaking down. There's a steady accretion of inefficiency mutations in the axons and that's why more and more switching mistakes are ...
— Cerebrum • Albert Teichner

... which he wrote the ode sung at its dedication in 1827, when he was a lad of nineteen, and before he had other than district school training, is now the manual training school of the city, and may be found, little changed except by accretion, on Winter Street, near the city hall. As this ode does not appear in any of his collected works, and is certainly creditable as a juvenile production, it is given here. It was sung to the air ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard

... of the Intercollegiate Peace Association, like that of most social movements, was slow in the first few years of its existence, but with the gradual accretion of new states it has gained in momentum, and is to-day increasing with such rapidity that only the lack of financial support will prevent it from embracing in its contests within another two years practically ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... wind?" "What makes this waves in the sea?" "Where does this animal live, and what is the use of that plant?" And if not snubbed and stunted by being told not to ask foolish questions, there is no limit to the intellectual craving of a young child; nor any bounds to the slow, but solid, accretion of knowledge and development of the thinking faculty in this way. To all such questions, answers which are necessarily incomplete, though true as far as they go, may be given by any teacher whose ideas ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... thin, ye poor craytures and don't yez be scairt! Have yez batin' and lumberin' thumps at the hairt, Wid ossification, and acceleration, Wid fatty accretion and bad vellication, Wid liver inflation and hapitization, Wid lung inflammation and brain-adumbration, Wid black aruptation and schirrhous formation, Wid nerve irritation and paralyzation, Wid extravasation and acrid sacration, Wid great ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn



Words linked to "Accretion" :   jurisprudence, growth, inheritance, heritage, biological science, law, deposit, gain, addition, increase, biology, geology, accumulation, deposition



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