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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. Before that, it meant ‘heaped together, accumulated’. As an English word, congeries has the oddity of looking as though it might be plural, and of forming a plural identical in form to the singular (as with species). In any case, I practised a little saying ‘congeries’ as four syllables, but could not be sure that anyone would understand me if I used it. Consulting the New Fowler’s, I found that RW Burchfield regarded the four-syllable pronunciation as ‘old-fashioned’ (in 1996) and advised instead: cn-JEER-eez. Current books on American usage suggest that the common pronunciation there is CON-juhr-eez. This pronunciation takes leave of the etymology.
After a little straw poll of literate friends I found that none knew the precise meaning of the word or its pronunciation. One cleverly rooted out the title of a book: Nabokov’s Congeries (an omnibus published in 1968). It is a very Nabokovian word, although the publishers thought better of it and three years later published the same collection as The Portable Nabokov. No sooner had it occurred to me that it is the sort of word that would have appealed to Borges too, than I turned up an example in ‘The Aleph’ (1945, translated with the author’s collaboration): ‘enumeration, congeries, conglomeration’. I fear that since his time the word might have entered into the realm of the precious, for I have now come across two collections of verse by little known poets entitled Congeries. Even so, novelists have used congeries fairly recently, as John Updike did in Roger’s Version (1986): ‘Our city, it should be explained is two cities, or more — an urban mass or congeries divided by the river.’ I think he will have found a smaller comprehending audience for it than Henrietta Darwin did.
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