congeries

English

WOTD – 12 March 2007

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin congeriēs (“heap, mass, pile”), from congerō (“I carry together”).

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈkɒndʒəɹiːz/, /kənˈdʒɪəɹiːz/
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈkɑːnd͡ʒəɹiːz/

• Audio (US)

  (file)

Noun

congeries (plural congeries)

1. A collection or aggregation of disparate items.
   • 1876, James Clerk Maxwell, “On Action at a Distance”, in Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain:

     And when the Newtonian philosophy gained ground in Europe, it was the opinion of Cotes rather than that of Newton that became most prevalent, till at last Boscovich propounded his theory, that matter is a congeries of mathematical points...

   • 1898, William McKinley, Second State of the Union Address:

     The world has seen the postal system developed from a congeries of independent and exclusive services into a well-ordered union, of which all countries enjoy the manifold benefits.

   • 1928, Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, London: The Hogarth Press, →OCLC; republished as Orlando: A Biography (eBook no. 0200331h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, July 2015:

     By short cuts known to him, he made his way now through the vast congeries of rooms and staircases to the banqueting-hall, five acres distant on the other side of the house.

   • 1932, H. P. Lovecraft, Dreams in the Witch-House:

     Two of the less irrelevantly moving things - a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles - seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position...

   • 1974, Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur, Faber & Faber, published 1992, page 40:

     The three of them could hardly tell themselves apart, became a sort of congeries of loving emotions, all mutually complementary.

   • 2003, Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, Penguin, published 2004, page 243:

     That whole congeries of values was now in question.

   • 2005, John Banville, The Sea, Picador, page 216:

     It was not what I was that I disliked, I mean the singular, essential me - although I grant that even the notion of an essential, singular self is problematic - but the congeries of affects, inclinations, received ideas, class tics, that my birth and upbringing had bestowed on me in place of a personality.

   • 2022, China Miéville, chapter 6, in A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, →OCLC:

     Where once it [the British royal family] was an organising hub of national accumulation and a centre of political power, now—as well, of course, as a congeries of extraordinarily wealthy rentiers—it's a farcical and profitable commodity for the culture industry, and an invaluable component of authoritarian national mythology.

Related terms

• congest

Translations

A collection or aggregation of disparate items

• Arabic: كَوْمَةٌ‎ f (kawmatun)
• Bulgarian: маса (bg) f (masa), куп (bg) m (kup)
• German: Ansammlung (de), Anhäufung (de), Komplex (de)
• Russian: скопле́ние (ru) n (skoplénije), ку́ча (ru) f (kúča)

Anagrams

• cinegoers, re-cognise, recognise

Latin

Alternative forms

• congeria

Etymology

From congerō (“I bring together, I heap”) +‎ -iēs.

Pronunciation

• (Classical) IPA^(key): /konˈɡe.ri.eːs/, [kɔŋˈɡɛrieːs̠]
• (Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /konˈd͡ʒe.ri.es/, [kon̠ʲˈd͡ʒɛːries]

Noun

congeriēs f (genitive congeriēī); fifth declension

1. heap, pile, mass
2. collection, accumulation

Declension

Fifth-declension noun.

Case	Singular	Plural
Nominative	congeriēs	congeriēs
Genitive	congeriēī	congeriērum
Dative	congeriēī	congeriēbus
Accusative	congeriem	congeriēs
Ablative	congeriē	congeriēbus
Vocative	congeriēs	congeriēs

Descendants

• → English: congeries
• → French: congère
• Italian: congerie
• Portuguese: congérie
• Spanish: congeries

References

• “congeries”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• “congeries”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
• congeries in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
• congeries in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette