Myriad

How to spell myriad

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce myriad

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does myriad mean?

1. adjectiveCountless or extremely numerous.
2. nounA countless or extremely great number of people or things.

Myriad in a sentence

• adjective

  The project failed for myriad reasons that nobody fully understood.

• noun

  The city offers a myriad of restaurants within walking distance.

• adjective

  The new software offers myriad ways to customise your reports.

• noun

  She sifted through a myriad of complaints before lunch.

Where does myriad come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word comes from the Greek myrias, with the stem myriad-, which literally meant 'ten thousand'. To the ancient Greeks ten thousand was the largest number with its own single word, so myrias also came to suggest a countless multitude, a number too great to bother counting. Latin borrowed it as myrias, and English picked it up in the 1500s, at first specifically meaning a unit of ten thousand and only later softening into the looser modern sense of 'a vast, uncountable number'. The double letters of its origin survive in the spelling: a single 'm', then the tricky 'yri' sequence that trips writers who expect 'miri' or 'myrid'. Its closest English relative is the obscure 'myriapod', a creature with a great many legs, which keeps the original 'great number' flavour alive.

How the word is built

• myri- (from Greek myrias: ten thousand)
• -ad (noun suffix denoting a group or number)