accretion

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin accrētiō, from ad (“to”) + crēscō (“grow”). First attested in the 1610s. Compare crescent, increase, accrue, and so on.

noun

1. The act of increasing by natural growth; especially 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.
   an accretion of earth
   A mineral augments not by growth, but by accretion.
   Suddenly starting from a proposition, exactly and sharply defined, in terms of utmost simplicity and clearness, he rejected the forms of customary logic, and by a crystalline process of accretion, built up his ocular demonstrations in forms of gloomiest and ghastliest grandeur, […] October 20, 1849, Nathaniel Parker Willis, “Death of Edgar Poe”, in Home Journal
   To strip off all the subordinate parts of his as a later accretion 1855, George Cornewall Lewis, An Enquiry Into the Credibility of the Early Roman History
   Our social life is largely a form, a whirl, a commercial relation, a display, a duty, the result of external accretion, not of internal growth. 1891, Amelia Gere Mason, The Women of the French Salons
   Written by accretion rather than from a single author's interpretation Wikipedia has a neo-positivist mania for facts that devalues interpretation in depth, yet in matching Friedrich's review against Nabokov it also shows that it is far from neutral. 2012-03-16, Edward Tenner, “Why Wikipedia's Fans Shouldn't Gloat”, in The Atlantic
   The systematic accretion of violence and complicity that engulfed whole populations at extreme velocity invoked a kind of bewilderment that ended in paralysis, even for many of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. 2018, Shoshana Zuboff, chapter 12, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
3. Something added externally to promote the external growth of an item.
4. Concretion; coherence of separate particles.
   the accretion of particles to form a solid mass
5. (biology) A growing together of parts naturally separate, as of the fingers or toes.
6. (geology) The gradual increase of land by deposition of water-borne sediment.
7. (law) 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.
8. (law) 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 percentage.
9. (astrophysics) The formation of planets and other bodies by collection of material through gravity.
   “In many ways, pebble accretion is the most efficient way of adding mass to a body,” says Lambrechts. 2018-04-26, Alexandra Witze, quoting Michiel Lambrechts, “Earth May Have Been Formed by a Bunch of Tiny Space Pebbles”, in The Atlantic
10. (conservation) Built-up matter lying on top of, rather than embedded in, a surface.
    Conservators may choose to leave accretions on an object for the additional details it may provide about an objects use, importance or history. 2012, American Institute for Conservation Wiki