tons
Britishplural noun
adverb
Explanation
If you have tons of something, you have an enormous amount of it, like when you buy tons of ice cream for your birthday party. The informal tons is perfect for exaggerating, making a large quantity sound even bigger. You might say, "I have tons of friends at my new school" or "Your library is tiny — my library has tons more books!" It's a way to play up size or amount while still being vague. Tons comes from ton, which is often used colloquially ("I ate a ton of pasta"), but is also a precise unit for measuring weight.
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.
"We expect that Starship V3 will be able to carry a payload of 100 metric tons, with future generations of Starship being designed to double this payload," it added.
From BBC • May 22, 2026
The new version of Starship is designed to carry 100 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, compared with about 23 metric tons for the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 vehicle.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 21, 2026
Disaster crews removed millions of tons of fire debris from nearly 9,700 properties affected by the Eaton and Palisades fires in roughly eight months.
From Los Angeles Times • May 21, 2026
Majungasaurus, for example, had a heavily built skull and extremely small arms despite weighing only about 1.6 tons, roughly one fifth the weight of T. rex.
From Science Daily • May 20, 2026
A typical hurricane is fifteen tons of wind force.
From "The (Mostly) True Story of Cleopatra's Needle" by Dan Gutman
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.
