Multitude

How to spell multitude

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce multitude

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does multitude mean?

1. nounA very large number of people or things.

Multitude in a sentence

• A multitude of small errors made the report difficult to read.

• The festival drew a multitude of visitors from across the country.

Where does multitude come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin multitudo, meaning 'a great number' or 'a crowd', which was built from the adjective multus, meaning 'much' or 'many'. The element -tudo was a common Latin ending used to turn an adjective into an abstract noun naming a state or quality, much as English -ness does today; it survives in many borrowed words such as 'gratitude', 'solitude', and 'magnitude'. English took the word in during the 1300s by way of Old French multitude, keeping both the meaning and the spelling almost unchanged. The familiar prefix multi- still does productive work in modern words like 'multiple' and 'multimedia', and recognising that 'many' sense inside multi- is a handy way to anchor the spelling. The tricky stretch is the unstressed middle vowel and the -tude ending, which sounds like '-tood' but is always written with the same -tude seen in its Latin cousins.

How the word is built

• multi- (many)
• -tude (noun suffix marking a state or condition)