Definition of "congeries" [con•ge•ri•es]

• A collection; an aggregation: "Our city, it should be explained, is two cities, or more—an urban mass or congeries divided by the river” ( John Updike). (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "A book can be a collection of linked stories, or it can be an episodic novel whose chapters have sufficient unity to have been first published separately such as Faulkner's "The Unvanquished", and both are just dandy, but the form I call a congeries hovers somewhere in between."
• "Sir Alfred Lyall's employment of the term _Brahmanism_ rather than _Hinduism_, is in keeping with his description of Hinduism, which he defines as the congeries of diverse local beliefs and practices that are held together by the employment of brahmans as priests."
• "(ko-uji) may be described as a congeries of from fifty to ninety blood relations."