myriad

Pluralmyriads

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A countless number or multitude of things of a particular kind.

   A myriad of tiny lights flickered across the harbor as night fell.

   Myriads of locusts descended on the valley, stripping every field bare.

   Similarplethora, wealth, scores, deluge

   Note

   The noun has a long literary history in the plural: Milton addresses "Myriads of immortal Spirits" in Paradise Lost (1667), and Walt Whitman sees battle-corpses, "myriads of them." The singular a myriad of is just as established; Letitia Elizabeth Landon uses it in 1834 for the beginnings of a speech that darted into a heroine's mind. Either way the noun takes of and the thing counted.

2. 2
   adjective

   Very great in number, too many to count.

   The new law brought myriad changes to how small businesses file their taxes.

   The reef supports myriad species of fish, crabs, and sponges.

   Similarcountless, innumerable, numerous, untold, many

   Note

   As an adjective the word goes straight before a plural noun, with no article and no of: myriad animals, myriad new restrictions. Beside the noun, it gives two ways to say the same thing, earth hosts myriad animals or a myriad of animals, and both are standard. It never compares: nothing is more myriad than anything else.

3. 3
   ten thousandnounformalcountable

   The number ten thousand.

   The general reported his strength as two myriads of foot soldiers, twenty thousand men in all.

   Greek mathematicians counted large quantities in units of a myriad, much as we count in thousands.

   Note

   The word's original, exact meaning. Greek muriás was the number ten thousand, and it came from muríos, "countless, numberless," so the precise count and the vague "countless number" meaning grew from one root. English took it through French and Late Latin, and the exact number now belongs mostly to formal writing and to accounts of how the Greeks counted.

4. 4
   adjective

   Many-sided, made up of countless elements or aspects.

   She loved the myriad life of the market, its noise and smells and endless bargaining.

   Under the microscope, a drop of pond water reveals a myriad world of darting, spinning creatures.

   Similarmultifaceted, varied, diverse, manifold

   Note

   Before a singular noun, or after a verb, the word says that one thing holds countless parts. William Faulkner's "soft myriad darkness of a May night" in Sanctuary is a single darkness full of many things, and a clinician can say the causes of a symptom may be myriad. Before a plural noun it means simply "very many", so the noun it goes with tells you which is meant.

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