Augment

Augment is a verb meaning to make something larger, more extensive, or more effective by adding something to it. It can refer to increasing size, amount, number, quality, or degree. The action is typically transitive, as in augment profits, augment capacity, or augment an dataset. The noun form is augmentation, and the related adjective augmentative is used in some linguistic and morphological contexts. The word derives from Latin augēre, “to increase,” through Old French, with usage attested in English from the medieval period.

In common usage, augment frequently appears in business, science, and technology. In business and economics, to augment revenue streams or capacity is a standard formulation, and “staff augmentation” refers to temporarily adding personnel to a team. In computing and data science, data augmentation describes techniques that expand a dataset by applying transformations such as rotations, flips, or color changes to existing data, helping improve model generalization. In biology and medicine, researchers may say a treatment augments an immune response or augments a physiological process, indicating an increase in activity or effect.

In linguistics, augment refers to a historical or morphological process that signals greater size or intensity, and the term augmentative is used for forms that convey such augmentation. Overall, augment carries a purposeful sense of enhancement through addition, rather than merely increasing by chance.

Related concepts include augmentation in various disciplines, data augmentation in machine learning, and, in popular usage, augmented reality, where the real world is supplemented by digital information.