Word: Coalesce

You Pronounce It: [koh-uh-les]

Definition:

verb (used without object), coalesced, coalescing.
1. to grow together or into one body:
The two lakes coalesced into one.
2. to unite so as to form one mass, community, etc.:
The various groups coalesced into a crowd.
3. to blend or come together:
Their ideas coalesced into one theory.
verb (used with object), coalesced, coalescing.
4. to cause to unite in one body or mass.

I found it while reading Adrienne Rich’s prose “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” when she states, “For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive” (Rich 174).