Conglomerate

How to spell conglomerate

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce conglomerate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does conglomerate mean?

1. nounA large corporation formed by combining several different and often unrelated businesses.
2. nounA sedimentary rock made of rounded pebbles cemented together in a finer matrix.
3. verbTo gather or combine separate elements into a single mass or group.

Conglomerate in a sentence

• noun

  The media conglomerate owns dozens of newspapers and radio stations.

• noun

  The cliff face was a coarse conglomerate of pebbles set in hardened sand.

• verb

  Over time the firms began to conglomerate into one vast holding company.

• noun

  A foreign conglomerate acquired the small family factory last spring.

• noun

  Students examined a sample of conglomerate under the classroom lamp.

• verb

  Loose sediment can slowly conglomerate into solid rock under pressure.

Where does conglomerate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin verb conglomerare, meaning 'to roll or heap together', formed from com- 'together' and glomerare 'to wind into a ball'. That verb in turn rests on the noun glomus, which literally meant a ball or a rounded mass of thread, the same image preserved in the English word 'clew' (a ball of yarn) and its descendant 'clue'. English adopted conglomerate in the early 1600s, first as a descriptive term for things clustered or rolled together, and geologists soon used it for rock made of rounded pebbles cemented in a mass. The familiar business sense, a large company built up from many smaller firms, only took hold in the mid twentieth century, extending the old idea of separate parts bound into one lump. The double presence of the unstressed schwa in '-glom-er-ate' is the spelling trap, since the middle vowels are easy to swap or drop.

How the word is built

• con- (together)
• glomer (from Latin glomus: a ball or rounded mass)
• -ate (forming a noun, adjective, and verb)