Definitions

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

  • noun Biology The growing together of related parts, tissues, or cells.
  • noun The amassing of physical particles.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In embryology, the formation of the body of the vertebrate embryo by the growing together of the lips of the blastopore.
  • noun Growth or increase; increment.
  • noun A growing together, in general; a coming together in process of growth or development, to unite or form one part: in anatomy and zoology, used of parts originally separate.
  • noun In biology, the growing together or coalescence of two or several individual cells or other organisms; conjugation; a kind of copulation in which two or more organisms become one. See conjugation, 4.
  • noun In botany, the union of cell-walls, as those of mycelial hyphæ, by means of a cementing substance formed in process of growth, so that they are inseparably grown together. Also called cementation.

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

  • noun rare Coalescence of particles; growth; increase by the addition of particles.

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

  • noun the growing together and merging of like or unlike separate parts or particles
  • noun art the juxtapositioning of dissimilar forms or devices that are harmonized at their point of intersection into hybrid transitional shapes or designs. Any emphasis or modification of these transitional forms that are used in the creation of designs and new forms

Etymologies

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

[Latin concrēscentia, from concrēscēns, concrēscent-, present participle of concrēscere, to grow together; see concrete.]

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word concrescence.

Examples

  • Verily, a concrescence looms... not a good thing, not a bad thing.

    Posthuman Blues Mac 2007

  • For Whitehead, everything in the world is a “concrescence of prehensions,” prehensions being the grasping or feeling of one thing by another in their on-going relations of becoming (1997, 47).

    Intersections Between Pragmatist and Continental Feminism Sullivan, Shannon 2007

  • But when most UU ministers, seminarians, and theologically curious laypeople like me talk about a theological crisis in Unitarian Universalism, we aren't worried about hermeneutics, phenomenology, or the phases of concrescence.

    Philocrites: September 2006 Archives 2006

  • But when most UU ministers, seminarians, and theologically curious laypeople like me talk about a theological crisis in Unitarian Universalism, we aren't worried about hermeneutics, phenomenology, or the phases of concrescence.

    Philocrites: Uh oh, it's salvation by hermeneutics. 2006

  • "Translocate fifteen degrees sub-axial to hemispherical concrescence of poly-carbon interface."

    Asimov's Science Fiction 2004

  • A few moments later you reached concrescence, the point where the resonation of you and the universe was precise enough to supply the energy for a local collapse.

    In Other Worlds Attanasio, A. A. 1984

  • Reichert had seen in the Newt, where certain bones in the roof of the mouth are actually formed by the concrescence of little teeth, (_supra_, p. 163).

    Form and Function A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology

  • Why, for instance, should the blastopore so often appear as a long slit, closing by concrescence, unless this had been the original method of its formation in remote Coelenterate ancestors?

    Form and Function A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology

  • Apart from this, botanists are generally agreed that the concrescence of parts of the flower-whorls -- in the gynaeceum as the seed-covering, and in the corolla as the seat of attraction, more than in the androecium and the calyx -- is an indication of advance, as is also the concrescence that gives the condition of epigyny.

    Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 Various

  • With regard to the specific characters of the species of _Zeugopterus_ nothing is known of peculiarities in mode of life which would give an importance in the struggle for existence to the concrescence of the pelvic fins with the ventral in _punctatus_, to the absence of this character and the elongation of the first dorsal ray in _unimaculatus_, or to the absence of both characters in _norvegicus_.

    Hormones and Heredity J. T. Cunningham 1897

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.