excrescence

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).[1]

• IPA^(key): /ɛkˈskɹɛsəns/, /ɪkˈskɹɛsəns/

excrescence (plural excrescences)

1. Something, usually abnormal, which grows out of something else.
   • 1847, Charlotte Brontë, chapter 7, in Jane Eyre‎:

     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.

   • 1903, Jack London, chapter 7, in The Call of the Wild‎:

     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.

   • 1933, George Orwell, chapter 31, in Down and Out in Paris and London‎:

     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.

2. A disfiguring or unwanted mark or adjunct.
3. (phonetics) The epenthesis of a consonant, e.g., warmth as [ˈwɔrmpθ] (adding a [p] between [m] and [θ]), or -t (Etymology 2).

   Synonym: vyanjanabhakti

   Antonym: anaptyxis

   Hypernym: epenthesis

• (phonetic): linking consonant

• excrescency
• excrescent

• (phonetic): intervocalic