Dictionary Definition
confluence
Noun
1 a place where things merge or flow together
(especially rivers); "Pittsburgh is located at the confluence of
the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers" [syn: meeting]
3 a coming together of people [syn: concourse]
User Contributed Dictionary
English
Noun
- The place where two
rivers, streams, or other continuously flowing bodies of water meet and
become one, especially where a tributary joins a river.
- We encountered an abandoned boat at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.
- The act of combining which occurs at the
place where rivers and the like meet.
- The confluence of the rivers produced a great rush of water.
- A convergence or
combination of forces, people, or things.
- The confluence of our skills resulted in a successful home renovation project.
Synonyms
Derived terms
Translations
point where two rivers or streams meet
- Estonian: liitumiskoht
- Finnish: yhtymäkohta
- French: confluent
- Hebrew: מפגש נהרות (mifgash neharot)
- Malay: kuala
- Nepali: dobhān
- Polish: zbieg (rzek)
- Portuguese: confluencia
- Tulu (a Dravidian language): kudala
Extensive Definition
Confluence, in geography, describes the
meeting of two or more bodies of
water. It usually refers to the point where a tributary joins a more major
river, called the mainstem,
when that major river is also the highest order
stream in the drainage
basin.
The term is also used to describe the meeting of
tidal or other non-riverine bodies of water, such as two canals or a canal and a lake. A
one-mile (1.6 km) portion of the Industrial
Canal in New Orleans accommodates the Gulf
Intracoastal Waterway and the
Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal; therefore those three
waterways are confluent there.
Notable confluences
- Allahabad in India, where the sacred rivers Ganges, Yamuna and Saraswati meet. It is one of the holiest places in Hinduism. The confluence itself is called Triveni Sangam.
- The merging of the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers. This merging point is the beginning of the Ohio River, thus forming a confluence in Pittsburgh.
- The Madison, Jefferson and Gallatin Rivers in Three Forks, Montana form the confluence of the Missouri River, one of the longest rivers in the United States (2,341 miles (3,767 km)).
- Kuala Lumpur the capital of Malaysia, is situated at the confluence of the Sungai Gombak, (previously known as Sungai Lumpur, which means muddy river) and Sungai Klang (Klang river).
- Passau known also as the Dreiflüssestadt (City of Three Rivers), because the Danube River is joined there by the Inn River from the South, and the Ilz River coming out of the Bavarian Forest to the North.
- Manaus, Brazil is located on the Rio Negro near its confluence with the Amazon. It is the chief port and a hub for the region's extensive river system.
- Osijek, Croatia is located on the right bank of the river Drava 25km upstream of its confluence with the Danube.
- Belgrade, the capital of Serbia lies at the confluence of the Sava and Danube Rivers.
- The Hochelaga Archipelago, including the island and city of Montreal, is located at the confluence of the St. Lawrence River and Ottawa River in Quebec, Canada.
- The two largest rivers in Australia, the Darling and the Murray converge at Wentworth, New South Wales
Integer latitudes and longitudes
Confluence also describes a location where integer latitude and integer longitude lines cross. The point in extreme northeastern New Jersey at is such a confluence point. The Degree Confluence Project endeavors to catalog and photograph all such points on the globe.References
confluence in Belarusian (Tarashkevitsa):
Вусьце
confluence in Belarusian: Вусьце
confluence in Bosnian: Ušće
confluence in Czech: Ústí
confluence in German: Mündung (Gewässer)
confluence in Spanish: Confluencia
confluence in French: Confluent
confluence in Croatian: Ušće
confluence in Hungarian: Torkolat
confluence in Japanese: 合流
confluence in Polish: Ujście rzeki
confluence in Portuguese: Confluência
confluence in Romanian: Confluenţă
confluence in Russian: Устье
confluence in Ukrainian: Гирло річки
Synonyms, Antonyms and Related Words
accompaniment, accordance, affluence, afflux, affluxion, agglomeration, agglutination, aggregation, agreement, alliance, approach, articulation, assemblage, assembly, association, asymptote, bond, bottleneck, bracketing, cahoots, call-up, canvass, census, clustering, co-working,
coaction, coincidence, collaboration, collection, collectivity, colligation, collision
course, collocation,
collusion, combination, combined
effort, communication, comparison, concatenation, concentralization,
concentration,
concert, concerted
action, concomitance, concordance, concourse, concurrence, conflux, congeries, conglomeration, congregation, congress, conjugation, conjunction, connection, consilience, conspiracy, convergence, converging, cooperation, copulation, corralling, correspondence, coupling, course, crosscurrent, crossing, current, data-gathering,
defluxion, downflow, downpour, drift, driftage, flow, flowing, fluency, flux, focalization, focus, funnel, gathering, gush, hookup, hub, inflow, ingathering, intercommunication,
intercourse,
interlinking,
inventory, joinder, joining, jointure, junction, juxtaposition, knotting, liaison, linkage, linking, marriage, meeting, merger, merging, mill run, millrace, mobilization, muster, mutual approach,
narrowing gap, onrush,
onward course, outflow,
pairing, parasitism, race, radius, rodeo, roundup, run, rush, saprophytism, set, simultaneity, spate, splice, spokes, stream, surge, survey, symbiosis, synchronism, synergy, tangent, tide, tie, tie-in, tie-up, trend, undercurrent, undertow, unification, union, united action, water flow,
yoking