The country around Down House in Kent was nothing but ‘a congeries of muddy lanes’ according to Darwin’s eldest daughter Henrietta (1843-1927). I realised, shortly after reading this, that I had never uttered the word congeries and hardly knew how.
Recourse to the OED alarmed me. Congeries, it stated, is a word of four syllables, stressed on the second, and pronounced cn-JEER-i-eez. That is logical, considering that it comes directly from Latin congeries, ‘a heap or pile’. Its connotation of heterogeneity is often suggested by a preceding qualification, ‘mere’. A related Latin word for the same thing is congestus, and congeries is thus connected with the English congest, not very helpfully as far as elucidating the sense goes, since congested has meant ‘filled up by an obstructive accumulation; overcrowded’ only since the 19th century.
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