Meaning & use
proliferate
To increase rapidly in number or spread quickly over a wide area.
See it in a sentence
Cheap smartphones have proliferated across the region, changing how people communicate.
Weeds proliferated in the garden after weeks of warm, rainy weather.
A note on using this word
Proliferate is intransitive in most modern usage, meaning things proliferate rather than someone proliferating them.
Words with a similar meaning
Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.
Words with an opposite meaning
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “proliferate”, then compare your use with the examples above.