Pl. cumuli. [L. cumulus a heap, etc.]
1. A heap, pile; an accumulation, gathering; the conical top of a heaped measure, hence the consummating mass.
1659. Hammond, On Ps. xxxiii. 7. It riseth into a cumulus.
1867. Manning, Eng. & Christendom, 76. My faith terminates no longer in a cumulus of probabilities gathered from the past.
1882. Farrar, Early Chr., II. 213. When we read the Jewish annals of these years, we never seem to have reached the cumulus of horrors.
2. Meteor. One of the simple forms of clouds, consisting of rounded masses heaped upon each other and resting on a nearly horizontal base. Frequent in the summer sky, where it often presents the appearance of snowy mountain-masses.
1803. L. Howard, Modif. Clouds (1865), 2–3. It may be allowable to introduce a Methodical nomenclature, applicable … to the Modifications of Cloud.…
Cumulus.… Convex or conical heaps, increasing upward from a horizontal base.
1820. Scoresby, Acc. Arctic Reg., I. 419. The grandeur of the cumulus or thunder-cloud is never seen, unless it be on the land.
1846. Ruskin, Mod. Paint., I. II. III. iii. § 6. In the lower cumuli … the groups are not like balloons or bubbles, but like towers or mountains.
attrib. 1851. Nichol, Archit. Heav., 48. The cumulus cloud predominates.
1892. ‘Vernon Lee,’ in Contemp. Rev., LXI. 666. Over the sea the wind had built a bridge, straight, flat, stretching from headland to headland, of white cumulus marble.
3. Anat. A thickened portion of the granular lining of the Graafian follicle in which the ovum is embedded; the Discus proligerus.
1882. in Syd. Soc. Lex.
