plurality
Pluralpluralities
- 1The largest number of votes won by any one candidate or option, when that number is still less than a majority of the valid votes cast.
With three strong candidates in the race, the mayor won with only a plurality of the vote.
In some states a plurality is enough to win, while others hold a runoff when no one passes 50 percent.
Note
Election rules turn on this word: in some contests a plurality wins outright, while others require a majority and hold a runoff when nobody passes half. The threshold can even differ within one ballot, as a 1977 Bangor Daily News editorial explains: repealing a tax needed a 50 percent majority, keeping it only a plurality. Relative majority is another name for it.
- 2The largest of several numbers or parts of a whole, which need not be more than half of it.
A plurality of respondents named cost as their main reason for not owning a car.
Catholics form a plurality of the town's churchgoers, though not a majority.
- 3The state of being plural, that is, of being more than one or, in grammar, of having a form that shows more than one.
In Turkish, plurality is marked with a suffix added to the noun.
Philosophers once argued over the plurality of worlds, the idea that Earth is not the only inhabited planet.
Note
The abstract noun of plural, built with -ity; its Old French ancestor pluralité already meant both "state of being plural" and "multitude", the two halves of this word's family. In grammar it names a category that languages mark in different places: Basque originally marked nominal plurality only on definite determiners, not on nouns.
- 4A group made up of many things or people; a large number.
The festival brings together a plurality of musical traditions from across the region.
Her research drew on a plurality of sources, from court records to private diaries.
Similarvariety, range, multitude, array
Note
Like a number of, the phrase often takes a plural verb, because the sense lies in the things counted: a plurality of ideas were put forth. It is a formal way of saying many, and it tends to stress variety as well as number: a plurality of musical traditions, of sources.
- 5A group made up of two or more things, as in the technical phrase a plurality of.
The device comprises a housing and a plurality of sensors mounted on its inner wall.
Each module contains a plurality of memory cells arranged in rows.
Note
Here the phrase is a patent drafter's tool for two or more: a device comprises a housing and a plurality of sensors; an array is organized into a plurality of blocks. It promises no large number, which is what separates it from the "many" meaning; in ordinary prose, several or multiple says the same.
- 6The quality or state of being many in number.
What struck visitors most was the plurality of churches in such a small town.
The sheer plurality of competing standards made early home computers hard to connect.
Similarmultiplicity
- 7The amount by which one number is larger than another, especially the lead in votes a winner has over the runner-up.
The governor carried the state by a plurality of about 80,000 votes.
Her plurality over the second-place finisher shrank as the late ballots were counted.
Note
Election reports use the word for two different numbers, and the preposition tells them apart: won a plurality names the leading total, while won by a plurality of 2,135,336 measures the gap over the runner-up, as with Truman's 1948 lead over Dewey. When by comes first, margin or lead is the plainer word.
- 8The condition in which one person experiences or shows several distinct personalities or selves in one body.
Online communities have given people who experience plurality a place to compare notes.
The therapist asked how plurality affected their daily life at work.
Similarmultiplicity
Note
Clinicians and people who call themselves plural share the word but not always the story behind it. Clinical psychology tends to trace plurality to early childhood trauma, while many in the plurality community report a multiplicity of selves before any trauma, and some writers place it on a broad spectrum of human experience alongside hearing voices.
- 9The state or practice of having more than one husband or wife at the same time.
The novel follows a household in which plurality of wives was taken for granted.
The anthropologist recorded how plurality of husbands worked in a few mountain villages.
- 10The practice of one member of the clergy holding more than one benefice, or paid church post, at the same time.
Reformers attacked plurality, complaining that the bishop drew income from four parishes he never visited.
The new rules banned pluralities, so each vicar had to give up all but one living.
Similarpluralism
Note
The word belongs to the old arguments over church reform, where a cleric holding several benefices drew income from each. Pluralism names the same practice, and the posts themselves were counted in the plural: in Areopagitica (1644), Milton reports the prelates' lament that any motion to remove pluralities and share church revenues more equally would discourage all learning.
Practice
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Origin
From plural + -ity; from Middle English pluralite, from Old French pluralité (“multitude, state of being plural”), from Latin plūrālitās.