Wiktionary
n. The state in which a series of repeated actions have an effect greater than the sum of their individual effects; noted especially in the repeated administration of drugs
Usage examples of "cumulative effect".
And if added to this there be a repellent unkemptness, a wild disorder of dress, a bushiness of dark hair white at the roots, and an unchecked growth of white beard on a face once clean-shaven, the cumulative effect is quite shocking.
Such behavior makes characters unpredictable, and the cumulative effect promotes chaos more than anything else.
Some of the infected may not undergo any perceptible change, mentally or physically, because they receive DNA fragments from so many sources that there is no focused cumulative effect other than a general destabilization of the system, resulting in rapidly metastasizing cancers and deadly autoimmune disorders.
Some of us will not change appreciably at all, because we will receive so many bits and pieces from so many sources that there will be nofocused cumulative effect.
The increased pressure, lateral displacement of a weld joint, and cumulative effect of years of high-temperature erosion of the steel damaged the joint.
However, it is the cumulative effect of this application of destruction power that will ultimately impose sufficient Shock and Awe, as well as perhaps destroy the physical means to resist, that an adversary will be forced to accept whatever terms may be imposed.
Layer upon layer, the cumulative effect of his painstaking and detailed analysis is to suggest that we are deluding ourselves when we suppose that accurate instruments for measuring longitude were not invented until the eighteenth century.
Kare had entertained at least a faint hope that the shock of the news might weaken High Ridge's grip on power, and he supposed it could still have a cumulative effect in that direction.
While standing in the darkness across the street from his girl's apartment, wondering how to tell her he is home, he is brought up against a barrage of circumstantial evidence whose inevitable cumulative effect in his mind is an overpowering conviction that she has been sleeping with another man.
And who knew what cumulative effect consciousness editing would have, over centuries?
Maybe she began to feel caged and smothered because of the cumulative effect of spending all day and most of the evening in cramped places.
The cumulative effect was causing a severe headache under his helmet-numbed scalp.
The Grand Patriarch's words were always well chosen, but their cumulative effect seemed much greater than their actual content.
This checking had apparently been so minor as to be essentially unnoticeable, until the cumulative effect of a number of such incidents began to show evidence of anomaly on the large, general scale.