Growth or increase in size; in rhetoric, a figure of speech where intensity or emphasis is heightened through amplification or accumulation.
From Greek 'auxesis' meaning 'growth' or 'increase,' derived from 'auxanein' (to grow). The term entered English through classical rhetoric studies and later expanded into biological usage.
Auxesis appears in Shakespeare—when Macbeth describes ambition as growing from 'vaulting' to 'o'er-leaping itself,' that's auxesis in action, and the same Greek concept describes how a fertilized egg grows into a human.
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