Word.ws English Dictionary

excrescence

/ɛkˈskɹɛsəns/

excrescence noun: something, usually abnormal, which grows out of something else.

Noun

excrescence (plural excrescences)

  1. Something, usually abnormal, which grows out of something else.
    • I have again and again intimated that I desire the hair to be arranged closely, modestly, plainly. Miss Temple, that girl’s hair must be cut off entirely; I will send a barber to-morrow: and I see others who have far too much of the excrescence—that tall girl, tell her to turn round.1847 October 16, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], chapter VII, in Jane Eyre. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC
    • The squirrels were in hiding. One only he saw,—a sleek gray fellow, flattened against a gray dead limb so that he seemed a part of it, a woody excrescence upon the wood itself.1903 July, Jack London, “The Sounding of the Call”, in The Call of the Wild, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., →OCLC, page 219
  2. A disfiguring or unwanted mark or adjunct.
    • Being bussum buddies, the two friends often communicated with mere exchange of psychic forces, verbal communication having been rendered unnecessary excrescence.1982 December 11, Andrea Loewenstein, “The Joys of Community or Holiday-itis Strikes Back”, in Gay Community News, volume 10, number 21, page 12
  3. The epenthesis of a consonant, e.g., warmth as [ˈwɔrmpθ] (adding a [p] between [m] and [θ]), or -t (Etymology 2).
    Synonyms:
    vyanjanabhakti

excrescence meaning in Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam and Sanskrit

excrescence in Tamil

குருப்பு

excrescence in Urdu

غیرطبیعی

excrescence in Malayalam

മുഴ, ദശയുടെ വളർച്ച, വിസ്ഫോടം, അനാവശ്യവസ്തു, മുഴയായ, അധികപ്പറ്റായ

excrescence in Sanskrit

excrescence, shoot
आरुह् ārúh
More languagesFewer languages
excrescence in Persian
آگنه āgne

Examples of excrescence in a sentence

  • Perhaps he meant that towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.1907 April, E[dward] M[organ] Forster, chapter XXXIII, in The Longest Journey, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, part...
  • He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.1933 January 9, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter XXXI, in Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Victor Gollancz...

Synonyms of excrescence

Antonyms

Forms of excrescence

pluralexcrescences

Origin of excrescence

From Middle English, early 15th century, in sense “(action of) growing out (of something else)”. Borrowed from Latin excrescentia (“abnormal growths”), from excrescentem, from excrēscere, from ex- (“out”) (English ex-) + crēscere (“to grow”) (English crescent). Sense of “abnormal growth” from 1570s, from earlier excrescency (1540s in this sense).

Words formed from excrescence

Words that rhyme with excrescence

Questions about excrescence

What does excrescence mean?
Excrescence means something, usually abnormal, which grows out of something else.
What is excrescence in Tamil?
Excrescence in Tamil is குருப்பு. See Excrescence meaning in Tamil.
How do you use excrescence in a sentence?
Perhaps he meant that towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
What part of speech is excrescence?
Excrescence is a noun.
How do you pronounce excrescence?
Excrescence is pronounced /ɛkˈskɹɛsəns/.
What is the plural of excrescence?
The plural of excrescence is excrescences.

Words near excrescence in the dictionary

  1. excrementizing
  2. excrementous
  3. excrements
  4. excresce
  5. excresced
  6. excrescence
  7. excrescences
  8. excrescencies
  9. excrescency
  10. excrescent
  11. excrescential

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: excrescence (page history and authors); excrescence (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); excrescence (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); excrescence (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors); आरुह् (Sanskrit) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-I learned some phrases-excrescence.wav, En-us-excrescence.oga.

Cite this entry: “excrescence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/excrescence. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.