Accumulating

How to spell accumulating

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce accumulating

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does accumulating mean?

1. verbGradually gathering or building up an increasing quantity of something over time.

Accumulating in a sentence

• The spare room was slowly accumulating boxes that nobody ever unpacked.

• Her savings account kept accumulating interest while she travelled abroad.

Where does accumulating come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb accumulare, which meant 'to heap up' or 'to pile together'. It was built from the prefix ad-, meaning 'to' or 'toward', and cumulare, 'to heap', which itself grew from the noun cumulus, a 'heap' or 'pile'. English adopted the verb accumulate in the sixteenth century to describe the gradual gathering of things into an ever larger mass, and the participle accumulating soon followed. The very same cumulus root survives in the name of the puffy, heaped cumulus cloud and in the word cumulative. Spelling trouble comes from the doubled c in the first syllable, a relic of ad- assimilating to ac- before the c of cumulare, paired with the single m that writers are often tempted to double.

How the word is built

• ac- (variant of ad-: to, toward)
• cumul (from Latin cumulus: a heap or pile)
• -ate (verb-forming suffix)
• -ing (present participle)