agregatory

Agregatory is an adjective used to describe something that serves to aggregate or facilitates aggregation—the act of combining multiple parts into a single whole. It is a relatively rare or obsolete spelling of aggregatory or aggregative and is not commonly used in contemporary English. Most modern usage prefers aggregatory or aggregative; agregatory appears in older texts or as a transliteration from other languages.

Etymology: from Latin aggregare "to bring together" via the English noun aggregate plus the suffix -ory/-atory, yielding adjectives such as aggregatory and aggregative. The relation to "aggregate" and "aggregation" is the core concept of combining components.

Usage: The term is found mainly in technical or academic writing when describing processes or mechanisms that bring together elements. In sociology or economics, aggregatory mechanisms describe the transformation of individual actions into macro-level outcomes. In data analysis, aggregatory (or aggregative) functions summarize data to produce totals, averages, or other statistics. In materials science, aggregatory processes may describe the clustering of particles, though the preferred terminology in most disciplines is aggregative or aggregated.

Notes: Agregatory is considered nonstandard in many dictionaries. When writing for broad audiences, readers are advised to use aggregatory or aggregative to avoid confusion.

See also: aggregation, aggregate, aggregator, aggregative, aggregatory function.