plethora
Americannoun
-
plethoras
plural
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overabundance; excess.
His crisis brought him a plethora of advice and an almost complete lack of assistance.
-
a large quantity or wide array; a lot.
The co-op program offers a plethora of advantages for students.
Visitors are drawn to the main beach, where a plethora of watersports can be enjoyed.
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Pathology Archaic. a morbid condition due to excess of red corpuscles in the blood or increase in the quantity of blood.
noun
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superfluity or excess; overabundance
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obsolete pathol a condition caused by dilation of superficial blood vessels, characterized esp by a reddish face
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of plethora
First recorded in 1535–45; from New Latin, from Greek plēthṓra “fullness,” from plḗthein “to fill, be full”; see also complete ( def. ), full 1
Explanation
Plethora means an abundance or excess of something. If you have 15 different people who want to take you on a date, you have a plethora of romantic possibilities. Plethora comes from the Greek for "fullness." Although it was originally used only in old-fashioned medicine to describe the condition of having too much blood, we use it to talk about any excessive supply. If you run a theater and all the seats are taken, that's a full house. But if the seats are full and people are standing in the aisles, you have a plethora of patrons. The stress is on the first syllable: PLETH-uh-ruh.
Vocabulary lists containing plethora
300 Most Difficult "SAT" Words
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This Week in Words: October 21- 27, 2018
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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:
This year, there was a plethora of choices.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 21, 2026
But the trade remains highly lucrative and the plethora of conflicts provides ever more opportunities.
From BBC ● Sep. 19, 2026
Significantly, despite the plethora of headlines about bond yields, volatility markets are not yet concerned, Bowler writes.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 10, 2026
Blumenfield said there is “a plethora of information including ecological and biological reports, insights from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, and years of evidence from neighbors” that the golf course is habitat for mountain lions.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 22, 2026
Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias.
From "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
Oxen are fattened into plethoras to encourage agriculture, and men of station dress like grooms, and bet like blacklegs, to keep up the breed of horses.
From Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 328, February, 1843 by Various
These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head; the world mounting to the brain of one man,—this would be mortal to civilization were it to last.
From Les Misérables by Isabel Florence Hapgood
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.
