myriad
Americannoun
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a very great or indefinitely great number of persons or things.
-
ten thousand.
adjective
noun
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(also used in plural) a large indefinite number
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archaic ten thousand
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of myriad
First recorded in 1545–55; from Greek mȳriad-, stem of mȳriás “ten thousand,” from mȳríos “countless”
Explanation
A myriad is a lot of something. If you’re talking about Ancient Greece, a myriad is ten thousand, but today you can use the word in myriad other ways. Myriad comes from the Greek myrioi, the word for ten thousand, or less specifically, a countless amount. Myriad can be a noun, like a myriad of choices, or an adjective, like when you study myriad subjects in college. If you lift a rock you might find a myriad of bugs. Sticklers often look down their noses at using myriad as a noun, but that usage came first.
Vocabulary lists containing myriad
Lord of the Flies
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Grade 10, List 2
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The Old Man and the Sea
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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:
Large-scale commodity crops such as corn, wheat and soybeans — which go into myriad processed foods as well as into sweeteners and animal feed — behave a little differently, he said.
From MarketWatch ● Jul. 18, 2026
Since the coup, some of Myanmar's myriad ethnic minority factions have banded with pro-democracy guerrillas to fight the armed forces.
From Barron's ● Jul. 18, 2026
They serve as a stand-in for Porter himself, who, though absent in the flesh, nevertheless is the central personage around which these myriad dynamics revolve.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 10, 2026
Adapted from Kalki's 2021 book, The Elephant in the Womb, which she wrote just months after giving birth, the play takes an unflinching look at motherhood and the myriad emotions mothers go through.
From BBC ● Jul. 9, 2026
Each of the myriad swirling spirits inside her spoke the words too.
From "Shadowshaper" by Daniel José Older
“Beyond healthcare, this fusion of nanotechnology and cells can lead to unique living hybrid robots, opening up myriads of interesting applications.”
From Salon ● Dec. 15, 2023
Stacking one’s few belongings in a safe place, trying to understand what is yelled in German, Russian, Ukrainian, looking into myriads of unknown faces, worried faces, some smiling faces.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 11, 2022
"Above all I want to thank those myriads of unassuming folk who have shown what love in action can achieve."
From BBC ● Dec. 24, 2021
Indeed, one way to approach quantum gravity is to aim to derive the Einstein equations, which are the laws general relativity applies to spacetime, from the laws of thermodynamics, applied to myriads of elementary events.
From Scientific American ● Apr. 4, 2019
Great stretches of the long grass, once the teeming jungle of summer, were almost deserted, with only a hurrying beetle or a torpid spider left out of all the myriads of August.
From "Watership Down: A Novel" by Richard Adams
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.
