accrete

verb ac·crete \ ə-ˈkrēt \

|Updated on: 5 Jun 2018

Examples: accrete in a Sentence

Definition of accrete

accreted; accreting

intransitive verb

: to grow or become attached by accretion

transitive verb

: to cause to adhere or become attached; also : accumulate

Examples of accrete in a Sentence

silt accreting at the mouth of the river over time

Recent Examples of accrete from the Web

The action accelerates as slowly as a stair car, accreting new subplots like hop-ons.

— New York Times, "Review: ‘Arrested Development’ Chases Its Past, Slowly," 28 May 2018
Those filaments could have shaped the direction in which matter accreted onto these galaxies’ haloes, some scientists say.

— kiona n. smith, Ars Technica, "New observations of galaxies challenge the standard cosmological model," 1 Feb. 2018
On the other hand, the rental bikes often seem to be scattered about the city in clumps: a phalanx of bikes accreting outside a Metro station, on a street corner, in a park.

— john kelly, Washington Post, "You can park a dockless bike-share bicycle anywhere. But you shouldn’t.," 19 Feb. 2018
Filling the bench is a project whose impact will accrete slowly, with one decision at a time by judges who hold their jobs for decades.

— tessa berenson, Time, "Inside Trump's Plan to Dramatically Reshape U.S. Courts," 8 Feb. 2018
The moon itself is thought to be a chunk of the Earth that was smashed off in an enormous collision and then accreted from the debris.

— jay bennett, Popular Mechanics, "The Moon Had a Thick Atmosphere Billions of Years Ago, NASA Study Finds," 5 Oct. 2017
These various solids, plus frozen water (oxygen and hydrogen), frozen ammonia (nitrogen and hydrogen) and frozen methane (carbon and hydrogen), are obvious ingredients for rocky and icy cores around which gas giants might accrete.

— The Economist, "PlanetologyMore ways to classify planets," 13 July 2017
Here, the more legible parts confer ceremonial dignity on the undignified rite of the blind-ish date, but the sequences don’t accrete into anything much.

— alexis soloski, New York Times, "Review: Rom-Com as Ritual in ‘The Art of Luv (Part 5)’," 26 May 2017
An actively accreting river delta (Peyto Lake, Canada; the Mississippi from a helicopter, and various others) 25.

— brian romans, WIRED, "100-things-meme (geologist edition)," 14 Dec. 2008

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'accrete.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.