amorphous

Oblivious to all the attention, the big cat calmly sashayed to a concave little hollow scooped out of an artificial granite cliff-side at the rear of her cage. There, her four sleeping, newborn cubs were nestled one atop another so tightly that they formed one amorphous lump of fur. —Jon Luoma, Audubon, November l982

Astronomers think our solar system took shape when an amorphous interstellar cloud of dust and gas collapsed under its own weight. The conservation of angular momentum, or spin, kept some of the material from simply falling all the way to the newborn sun; instead it settled into a pancake shape. —Michael W. Werner et al., Scientific American, June 2009

Most library and academic accrediting associations either ignore weeding or have general, rather amorphous, standards. Among the more specific standards are those of the American Library Associations' 1967 public library systems standards, which suggest annual weeding of at least 5 percent of “community collections,” with headquarters libraries weeding more cautiously … —LJ Special Report, 1990

A quarter of a century ago, author Betty Friedan stumbled upon a “problem that has no name.”“ Middle-class American women were prisoners of gilded cages, she argued, unfulfilled by their exclusive roles as wives and mother. Friedan gave the amorphous problem, and the book that described it, a name—”The Feminine Mystique“—and with it helped launch one of the most transforming social movements in modern history.” —Eloise Salholz et al., Newsweek, 31 Mar. 1986

an amorphous segment of society

amorphous lumps of clay magically transformed by a skilled potter's hands into works of art