English

Noun

congeries ‎(plural congeries)

1. A collection or aggregation of disparate items.
   • 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:

     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 1992, p. 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 2004, p. 243:

     That whole congeries of values was now in question.

   • 2005, John Banville, The Sea, Picador 2005, p. 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.

Translations

Anagrams

• re-cognise, recognise

Latin

Alternative forms

• congeria

Pronunciation

• (Classical) IPA^(key): /konˈɡe.ri.eːs/, [kɔŋˈɡɛ.ri.eːs]

Noun

congeriēs f ‎(genitive congeriēī); fifth declension

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

Inflection

Fifth declension.

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, 1883–1887)
• Félix Gaffiot (1934), “congeries”, in Dictionnaire Illustré Latin-Français, Paris: Hachette.