Synonyms:
accumulative, cumulative
Meaning: increasing by successive addition; "the benefits are cumulative"; "the eventual accumulative effect of these substances"
Usage examples
These coincidences are certainly very striking, and they have a cumulative force.
A secretion of the brain? The cumulative expression, wholly chemical, of the multitudes of cells that form us?
To be socially important and expressible in some common medium, initial differences in temper must be organised into custom and become cumulative by being imitated and enforced.
And so they would always have remained in crude experience, if no cumulative reflection, no art, and no science had come to dominate and foreshorten that equable flow of substance, arresting it ideally in behalf of some rational interest.
This is not a periodic disturbance, like the temporary acceleration of its motion discovered by Laplace, which in a few centuries, more or less, will be reversed; it is a disturbance which always acts one way, and which is therefore cumulative.
Few thoughtful persons now hold the view that the race can be rapidly improved biologically by the process of educating the individual. Education is cumulative in so far as it builds up a better environment into which other children will be born, but the betterment is not due to the inheritance by the child of the acquired knowledge and skill of the parent.
It is a small effect, but it is cumulative; and gradually, by much slower degrees than anything we have yet contemplated, we are presented with a picture of the month getting gradually shorter than the day, the moon gradually approaching instead of receding, and so, incalculable myriads of ages hence, precipitating itself upon the surface of the earth whence it arose.