How to Use accrete in a Sentence

accrete

verb
  • Paint is woven and layered and allowed to accrete in ways that evoke human flesh.
    — Los Angeles Times, 21 Oct. 2020
  • Built from wool and cotton remnants of shuttered mills and dyed by hand, her pieces accrete by knots, each like a scar.
    — Jerry Saltz, Vulture, 29 Sep. 2025
  • Meanwhile ice can accrete on both the top and underside of branches and power lines.
    — Andrea Thompson, Scientific American, 26 Jan. 2026
  • The metallic nodules take millions of years to form as metals slowly accrete around a small core.
    — Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 20 Dec. 2016
  • This produces what are called luminous accreting black holes.
    — Chris Lee, Ars Technica, 14 Nov. 2018
  • Filling the bench is a project whose impact will accrete slowly, with one decision at a time by judges who hold their jobs for decades.
    — Tessa Berenson, Time, 8 Feb. 2018
  • There was still mass being thrown around instead of accreted directly into the black hole.
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 9 Sep. 2025
  • This births a star that continually accretes more gas and becomes more massive.
    — Keith Cooper, Space.com, 28 Apr. 2026
  • Despite this enormous size, the black hole is actually accreting–or eating–gas at a very low rate.
    — Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 18 Dec. 2024
  • The action accelerates as slowly as a stair car, accreting new subplots like hop-ons.
    — New York Times, 28 May 2018
  • The moon itself is thought to be a chunk of the Earth that was smashed off in an enormous collision and then accreted from the debris.
    — Jay Bennett, Popular Mechanics, 5 Oct. 2017
  • Eventually the star stops accreting matter, leaving the disk in orbit around it.
    — Eric Lagatta, USA Today, 28 Aug. 2025
  • And when researchers tried to add extra oxytocin by itself, the hormone’s benefits were overwhelmed by waste accreted in old blood.
    — The Economist, 12 Sep. 2019
  • This theoretical limit concerns how much matter can be accreted to a compact body like a neutron star or black hole.
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 18 Sep. 2025
  • The pieces have accreted over time, gobbled up from years and years of StackExchange posts and Reddit threads.
    — Lee Hutchinson, ArsTechnica, 6 May 2026
  • Any dust and gas not accreted onto rocks by then is lost, burned in the star or dispersed in space, and no more material for planet building is available.
    — Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, Scientific American, 1 Dec. 2016
  • Kidney stones form when minerals, usually calcium, accrete in the kidneys and begin to form jagged lumps.
    — Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 26 Sep. 2016
  • Type Ia supernova explosions spur the destruction of white dwarf stars that have accreted too much mass.
    — Keith Cooper, Space.com, 20 Feb. 2025
  • Precedent mattered to her, as did the expectations that accreted around Court rulings.
    — Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, 3 Dec. 2023
  • The new photo further exposes a larger, darker central region surrounded by bright accreting gas in a ring-like shape.
    — Ariana Garcia, Chron, 14 Apr. 2023
  • Meanwhile, in Leah’s chapters, the details of that disastrous deep-sea mission begin to accrete, sharp and beautiful as coral polyps.
    — Ron Charles, Washington Post, 12 July 2022
  • The Earth, once thought to have slowly accreted over 100 million years, actually took less than three, the paper says.
    — Matt Hrodey, Discover Magazine, 16 June 2023
  • Others got flung toward the accreting planet by collisions or close encounters with other objects, and Jupiter played a key role in that process.
    — Kiona N. Smith, Space.com, 17 June 2026
  • An artist’s illustration of an accreting supermassive black hole.
    — Fan Zou, Discover Magazine, 20 July 2024
  • Those filaments could have shaped the direction in which matter accreted onto these galaxies’ haloes, some scientists say.
    — Kiona N. Smith, Ars Technica, 1 Feb. 2018
  • In a gas-dwarf scenario, planets are believed to form rock cores that accrete a small percentage of hydrogen-helium during the formation process.
    — Julia Jacobo, ABC News, 16 Mar. 2026
  • Like witches in the ages between them, both women are symptomatic figures, endlessly accreting the stories a culture wants to tell about itself.
    — Lidija Haas, Harper's Magazine, 27 Apr. 2020
  • But to grow large, hail stones must be levitated for long periods of time high in the storm cloud, to accrete layer upon layer and this requires a vigorous cloud updraft.
    — Jason Samenow, Washington Post, 16 May 2022
  • That means that as a galaxy ages, the supernova deaths of stars are depositing less and less gas in the vicinity of the central accreting supermassive black hole.
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 15 Jan. 2025
  • Discovery of extreme quasi-periodic eruptions in a newly accreting massive black hole.
    — David Faris, MSNBC Newsweek, 11 Apr. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'accrete.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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