fjølga

Fjölga is an Icelandic verb meaning "to increase in number" or "to multiply". It is commonly used in everyday language, journalism, demography and statistical contexts to describe growth in quantity, population, occurrences or items. The verb can be used transitively (e.g., að fjölga something) to indicate that an agent increases the number of something, and intransitively or reflexively to indicate that a quantity has grown (e.g., eitthvað fjölgar eða fjölgaðist).

The noun form fjölgun denotes "an increase" or "growth", and related vocabulary includes the prefix fjöl- meaning "many" and terms like fjölmennur ("crowded" or "numerous"). Conjugation follows regular patterns for Icelandic weak verbs: infinitive að fjölga, present fjölg-ar (hann fjölgar), past fjölg-aði (hann fjölg-aði) and past participle fjölgað.

Etymologically the word is rooted in the Old Norse lexicon and is part of a family of words in Icelandic related to multiplicity and abundance. In contemporary usage it appears in discussions of population change, economic indicators, biological reproduction, and general descriptions of increasing counts. The term is neutral and descriptive, used both in formal reporting and casual speech to convey changes in numerical quantity.