gathering place; center; hotbed
Literary or formal term for a place where people, things, or ideas gather, often with a nuance of depth or concentration. Rare in everyday speech; more common in written or classical contexts.
This town is known as a gathering place for artists.
The library is a center of knowledge.
Literary kanji compound; both characters suggest depth and gathering. Rare in modern writing.
Variant kanji form with 藪 (thicket, bush) instead of 叢 (cluster, thicket). Equally rare.
A Sino-Japanese word from Chinese 淵叢, literally a deep pool and a thicket, both places where things gather. It consequently came to mean a center, gathering place, or hotbed.