Affluxes

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The arrival of a large number of people or things at once
2. the act of flowing into a place or group, often associated with a significant influx
3. a considerable increase or accumulation of resources or benefits coming together at a single point

Etymology: "Affluxes" is simply the plural of "afflux," so the story is that of the noun itself. "Afflux" comes from Latin "affluere," meaning "to flow to" or "to flow toward," built from "ad-" (toward) and "fluere" (to flow). Its past participle "affluxum" gave English the noun, so the word carries the physical image of liquid streaming toward a point, which is why it can describe a crowd or stream of arrivals arriving in numbers. The noun shares its root with "affluent," which likewise descends from "affluere" and originally carried the sense of flowing abundantly, before it came to mean wealthy. Read the two side by side and you can see the same flowing motion at work: abundance in one, arrival in the other.

Synonyms: inflows, inundations

Antonyms: outflows