accum

Accum is a term used across disciplines to denote the act or device of gathering inputs into a single summary value. It is encountered as an abstract operation in mathematics, as a common pattern in software development, and as a hardware concept in computing.

Etymology and scope. The word derives from accumulate, with accum appearing as a shorthand in various technical communities. As a general concept, accumulation describes collecting past inputs to form a total, tally, or record that can be used for further analysis or processing.

Mathematics and statistics. In analysis and probability, accumulation refers to forming a running total by summing a sequence or integrating a rate function over a domain. The result is an accumulation function, which describes how the total grows as the domain expands. In probability, cumulative quantities often arise from integrating or summing over time or space.

Computing and programming. In software, accum is a common variable name that stores a running total, count, or other aggregated result as data streams in. The pattern is typically implemented with a loop or streaming operation such as map-reduce, fold, or an explicit incremental update, enabling efficient accumulation without re-reading all inputs.

Hardware and architecture. In computer hardware, an accumulator (related in spirit to accum) is a register or dedicated circuit that holds intermediate results of arithmetic operations. Accumulators allow successive additions or other operations to be performed with reduced memory access, and they were central to the design of early and some contemporary processors.

See also. Accumulator, accumulate, running total. Accum emphasizes the general idea of gathering and preserving partial results until a final total is produced.