Congeries

From Latin congeriÄ“s ("heap, mass, pile"), from congerÅ ("I carry together").

Full definition of congeries

(plural congeries)

1898, William McKinley, :The world has seen the postal system developed from a congeries of independent and exclusive services into a well-ordered union, of which all countries enjoy the manifold benefits.
1928, Virginia Woolf, :By short cuts known to him, he made his way now through the vast congeries of rooms and staircases to the banqueting-hall, five acres distant on the other side of the house.
1932, H. P. Lovecraft, :Two of the less irrelevantly moving things - a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles - seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position...
1974, Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur, Faber & Faber 1992, p. 40:The three of them could hardly tell themselves apart, became a sort of congeries of loving emotions, all mutually complementary.
2003, Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, Penguin 2004, p. 243:That whole congeries of values was now in question.
2005, John Banville, The Sea, Picador 2005, p. 216:It was not what I was that I disliked, I mean the singular, essential me - although I grant that even the notion of an essential, singular self is problematic - but the congeries of affects, inclinations, received ideas, class tics, that my birth and upbringing had bestowed on me in place of a personality.