Consolidate means to bring together. You may feel like you don't have any pens, but if you consolidate all the pens lying around your house into one basket, you might find you in fact have a thousand.
Consolidate has its roots in Latin: by combining com- (meaning "together") with solidare (meaning "to make solid"). So, when you think about consolidate, think about bringing things together to make something solid, stronger, or easier to handle. A general might consolidate his troops, a librarian might consolidate all the books about exciting women on a Women's History Month shelf, or someone with a lot of credit-card debt might try to consolidate the debt from his different cards.
