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''excrescence'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260313192153-00-⌔

excrescence - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

excrescence (plural excrescences)

  • 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.1
    • ✤ 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.2
    • ✤ Perhaps he meant that towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.3
    • ✤ It is taken for granted that a beggar does not ‘earn’ his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic ‘earns’ his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.4
  • 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.5
  • (phonetics) The epenthesis of a consonant, e.g., warmth as [ˈwɔrmpθ] (adding a[p] between[m] and [θ]), or -t (Etymology 2).
    • ✤ Synonym: vyanjanabhakti
    • ✤ Antonyms: svarabhakti, anaptyxis
    • ✤ Hypernym: epenthesis

Etymology

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).6

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /ɛkˈskɹɛsəns/, /ɪkˈskɹɛsəns/
  • Rhymes: -ɛsəns

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1847 October 16, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], chapter VII, in Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. […], volume, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC: ↩

  2. 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: ↩

  3. 1907 April, E[dward] M[organ] Forster, chapter XXXIII, in The Longest Journey, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, part III (Wiltshire), page 336: ↩

  4. 1933 January 9, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter XXXI, in Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Victor Gollancz […], →OCLC, page 234: ↩

  5. 1982 December 11, Andrea Loewenstein, “The Joys of Community or Holiday-itis Strikes Back”, in Gay Community News, volume 10, number 21, page 12: ↩

  6. Douglas Harper (2001–2026), “excrescence”, in Online Etymology Dictionary. ↩

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