agglomerate

Etymology

From Latin agglomerare (“to wind into a ball”), from ad (“to”) + glomerare (“to wind into a ball”), from glomus (“a ball”), akin to globus (“a ball”).

adj

1. collected into a ball, heap, or mass

noun

1. A collection or mass.
2. (geology, volcanology) A mass of angular volcanic fragments united by heat; distinguished from conglomerate.
3. (meteorology) An ice cover of floe formed by the freezing together of various forms of ice.

verb

1. (transitive, intransitive) To wind or collect into a ball; hence, to gather into a mass or anything like a mass.
   The bustle of a croud is not ill-adapted to the pencil: but the management of it requires great artifice. The whole must be massed together, and considered as one body. ¶ I mean not to have the whole body so agglomerated, as to consist of no detached groups: but to have these groups […] appear to belong to one whole, by the artifice of composition, and the effect of light. 1789, William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye: and Several Parts of South Wales, 2nd edition, London: R. Blamire, Section 10, p. 122
   1820, William Hazlitt, “Explanations—Conversation on the Drama with Coleridge” in Dramatic Essays London: Scott, 1895, p. 197, His [Jean Racine’s] tragedies are not poetry, are not passion, are not imagination: they are a parcel of set speeches, of epigrammatic conceits, of declamatory phrases, without any of the glow, and glancing rapidity, and principle of fusion in the mind of the poet, to agglomerate them into grandeur, or blend them into harmony.
   There were few white friends in the social life of the peasants. The white colony agglomerated in the towns and the peasants were 80 per cent of a population of a million. 1937, Claude McKay, chapter 3, in A Long Way from Home, New York: Arno Press, published 1969, page 35
   It feels like doing eighty on the freeway / as little towns agglomerate and blur: 2009, Peter Campion, “Imperium”, in The Lions, University of Chicago Press, page 14