The piling up of many words, whether synonyms or not, to create a single general idea.
Congeries is a general term for the piling up of words. It is often used to describe the accumulation of synonyms, as in synonymia, or the accumulation of arguments, as in accumulatio.
See also accumulatio, synonymia.
Here is an example of congeries from Shakespeare's Hamlet:
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.