Meaning & use

proliferate

verb·Academic

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

multiplyspreadincrease rapidly

Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.

Words with an opposite meaning

dwindledecline

Make it your own

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