Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use accretion in a sentence

14 example sentences · noun

Accretion means increase by natural growth, especially the gradual increase of organic bodies by the internal addition of matter; organic growth; also, the amount of such growth. Example: “A mineral augments not by growth, but by accretion.”

Examples of accretion by meaning

noun(Gradual) increase by an external addition of matter; (countable) an instance of this.

  • A mineral augments not by growth, but by accretion.
  • These fresh accretions of capital were immediately invested in other ventures.1910 October, Jack London, chapter XI, in Burning Daylight, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC, part I, page 106
  • 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.2019, Shoshana Zuboff, “‘We Make Them Dance’: Surveillance Capitalism, the Rise of Instrumentarian Power, and the Threat to Human Rights”...

nounThe process of separate particles aggregating or coalescing together; concretion; (countable) a thing formed in this...

  • The accretion of particles forms a solid mass.

nounSomething gradually added to or growing on a thing externally.

  • accretion of ice

nounA substance which has built up on the surface of an object, rather than become embedded in it.

  • Accretions of dirt on clothing are often left in place by conservators because they can provide additional details about the artefact’s importance or history.
  • In Pure Lust Daly attempts to pare away the accretions of patriarchal ideology and reveal the fundamental elements of emerging feminist philosophy.1985 February 2, Sandra Karp, “Making Female Experience Sacred”, in Gay Community News, volume 12, number 28, page 12

More sentences with accretion

  • Goebbels’s typically voracious settings represent, as one performer said in a preconcert discussion, “the accretions of centuries.”2009 January 22, James R. Oestreich, “Gertrude Stein's Texts as Songs Spoken by Instrumentalists”, in New York Times. From the entry preconcert
  • Shoshonitic magmatism younged southwards in the Superior Province, commensurate with the southwardly diachronous accretion of allochthonous subprovinces.1994, R. Kerrich, D.A. Wyman, “The mesothermal gold-lamprophyre association”, in Mineralogy and Petrology, →DOI. From the entry young
  • In the folk tradition, rites, festivals, and myths began an early accretion around an apotheosized Ch'ü Yuan.1988, Lyman P. Van Slyke, Yangtze: Nature, History and the River, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., →ISBN, page 137. From the entry Dragon Boat Festival
  • Ongoing accretion at a subduction zone, and the obduction of intact ophiolite slabs, are not considered to be collision.2012, Joseph A. DiPietro, Landscape Evolution in the United States, →ISBN, page 340. From the entry obduction
  • The mountain belt came together as an accretion of terranes.2004, Richard Fortey, The Earth, Folio Society, published 2011, page 195. From the entry terrane
  • But this natural religion of mankind has, in every country, become encrusted over by many accretions which are artificial.1923, Joseph Shaw Bolton, Natural Religion: The Ultimate Religion of Mankind. From the entry natural religion
  • If the Moon was formed during the Earth's accretion, a subsequent accretion of residual heliocentric planetesimals onto the protoearth and the protomoon must have occurred.2004 March, Ryuji Morishima, Sei-ichiro Watanabe, “Co-accretion of the Earth–Moon system after the giant impact: reduction of the total…. From the entry protomoon

Meaning of accretion

  1. noun Increase by natural growth, especially the gradual increase of organic bodies by the internal addition of matter; organic growth; also, the amount of such growth.
  2. noun (Gradual) increase by an external addition of matter; (countable) an instance of this.
  3. noun The process by which material is added to a geological feature; specifically, to a tectonic plate at a subduction zone.

Full definition of accretion

Questions about accretion in a sentence

How do you use accretion in a sentence?
Accretion is used as a noun. For example: “A mineral augments not by growth, but by accretion.”
What is a short sentence with accretion?
“accretion of ice”
What does accretion mean?
Accretion means increase by natural growth, especially the gradual increase of organic bodies by the internal addition of matter; organic growth; also, the amount of such growth.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: accretion (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use accretion in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/accretion. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.