Verb

(en verb)

To draw out; to extend, especially in duration.

*2010 , (Christopher Hitchens), ‘The Men Who Made England’, The Atlantic , Mar 2010:

*:Still, form these extraordinary pages you can learn that it's very bad to be burned alive on a windy day, because the breeze will keep flicking the flames away from you and thus protract the process.

To use a protractor.

(surveying) To draw to a scale; to lay down the lines and angles of, with scale and protractor; to plot.

To put off to a distant time; to delay; to defer.

to protract a decision or duty

(Shakespeare)

To extend; to protrude.

A cat can protract and retract its claws.

Verb

(proliferat)

To increase in number or spread rapidly.

The flowers proliferated rapidly all spring.

* {{quote-book, year=2006, author=

, title=Internal Combustion , chapter=2 citation , passage=But through the oligopoly, charcoal fuel proliferated throughout London's trades and industries.  By the 1200s, brewers and bakers, tilemakers, glassblowers, pottery producers, and a range of other craftsmen all became hour-to-hour consumers of charcoal.}}