multitude
Americannoun
-
multitudes
plural
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a great number; host.
a multitude of friends.
-
a great number of people gathered together; crowd; throng.
- Synonyms:
- mass
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the state or character of being many; numerousness.
-
the multitude, the common people; the masses.
noun
-
a large gathering of people
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the common people
-
a large number
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the state or quality of being numerous
Synonym Usage
See crowd 1.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of multitude
First recorded in 1275–1325; Middle English word from Latin word multitūdō. See multi-, -tude
Explanation
A multitude is a very large number or a huge crowd. If you see a multitude of zombies approaching, you're in trouble. Sometimes the word multitude refers to the common people, or the masses — that is, everyone in a society apart from the political elite. There are a lot of words and phrases for this, like hoi polloi, which is Greek for "the many," and "the great unwashed." Those last two terms are usually used in a disapproving way, but multitudes is generally a positive term. If you were to say that a leader inspired the multitudes to rise up against their oppressor, we'd assume that you sympathized with the multitudes.
Vocabulary lists containing multitude
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Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Still, the results are likely to boost the multitude of lawsuits working their way through courts across the country.
From Barron's ● Jul. 16, 2026
A multitude of nations were represented in this local hostelry.
From BBC ● Jun. 27, 2026
He believes that successful software companies will need to create a “combined data universe from all the multitude of enterprise apps on the client side.”
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 22, 2026
That sense of complexity fuels Vecna, the antagonist of “Stranger Things,” whose climactic final season sees the character, played by Jamie Campbell Bower, take on a multitude of faces — some human and some grotesque.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 1, 2026
Science never captured the imagination of the multitude.
From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan
What’s more, you are also donating to a food bank to put food into the backpacks of multitudes of children.
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 20, 2026
Even so expansive an idea as the “Abrahamic faiths”—Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Mormonism—fails to capture, to borrow Walt Whitman’s formulation, the religious multitudes that America contains.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 19, 2026
Among the many tasks: managing ever-multiplying multitudes of cattle.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 23, 2026
In response to her complaints, the filing says, the company "retaliated against her, demonetizing her X account and generating multitudes more images of her".
From BBC ● Jan. 16, 2026
“Let the flood descend, the flood of Poor peasants and poor soldiers, The flood of the poor jobless multitudes Let that flood descend!”
From "Taste of Salt: A Story of Modern Haiti" by Frances Temple
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
