Definitions

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

  • transitive verb To tie or group together.
  • transitive verb Logic To bring (isolated facts) together by an explanation or hypothesis that applies to them all.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To bind or fasten together, literally or figuratively.

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

  • transitive verb To tie or bind together.
  • transitive verb (Logic) To bring together by colligation; to sum up in a single proposition.
  • adjective Bound together.

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

  • verb To formally link or connect together logically.

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

  • verb make a logical or causal connection
  • verb consider (an instance of something) as part of a general rule or principle

Etymologies

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

[Latin colligāre, colligāt- : com-, com- + ligāre, to tie, bind; see leig- in Indo-European roots.]

Support

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

Examples

  • At the opposite end of the colligate scale, only a few doors away, is Harlem's answer to a happening high-priced $100-per-person dining experience, the Hudson River Café, where you may dine upstairs or down, inside or out.

    Michael Henry Adams: Touring Harlem, Lost and Found 2009

  • These hypotheses involve generic concepts that, in Whewell's terms, “colligate” the more specific concepts that appear in hypotheses further down the ladder.

    John Stuart Mill Wilson, Fred 2007

  • Typically, finding the appropriate conception with which to colligate a class of phenomena requires a series of inferences, thus Whewell noted that discoverers's induction is a process involving a “train of researches”

    William Whewell Snyder, Laura J. 2006

  • However, selecting the appropriate conception with which to colligate the data is not conjectural (1858b, p. 78).

    William Whewell Snyder, Laura J. 2006

  • On the other hand, the data which a historian tries to colligate may be deemed to be data on evaluative grounds that another historian may not accept.

    Letting Go White, Morton 1967

  • In other cases (no doubt) instead of collecting the conception from the very phenomena which we are attempting to colligate, we select it from among those which have been previously collected by abstraction from other facts.

    A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive (Vol. 1 of 2) John Stuart Mill 1839

  • In other cases, no doubt, instead of collecting the conception from the very phenomena which we are attempting to colligate, we select it from among those which have been previously collected by abstraction from other facts.

    A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive John Stuart Mill 1839

  • The conceptions, then, which we employ for the colligation and methodization of facts, do not develop themselves from within, but are impressed upon the mind from without; they are never obtained otherwise than by way of comparison and abstraction, and, in the most important and the most numerous cases, are evolved by abstraction from the very phenomena which it is their office to colligate.

    A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive John Stuart Mill 1839

  • Here's how to find the perfect colligate bag to hold your phone, makeup, and oh yeah, your textbooks.

    The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com Nisha Ramirez 2011

  • After being drafted into the military, Chappelle began his colligate career studying electrical engineering at Phoenix College.

    CR4 - Recent Forum Threads and Blog Entries nsbe 2010

Comments

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

  • A conspiracy theorist’s first rate

    At sniffing the schemes of Deep State,

    Connecting the dots

    Of devious plots

    And gathering facts to colligate.

    January 25, 2019