Plethora

How to spell plethora

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce plethora

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does plethora mean?

1. nounA very large or excessive amount of something.

Plethora in a sentence

• The new café offers a plethora of vegetarian options.

• The report drowned the board in a plethora of statistics.

Where does plethora come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek plethore, meaning 'fullness' or 'repletion', which was built on the verb plethein, 'to be or become full'. The same root sits behind the idea of a crowd or multitude, since a full place is a crowded one. English took the word in the late 1500s through Latin (plethora) as a strictly medical term: it described an unhealthy excess of blood or other bodily fluids, a condition thought to need draining or bloodletting. Over the 1700s the sense broadened from a bodily over-fullness to any over-abundance of things, and the negative tinge of 'too much' has largely faded so that today it usually just means 'a great many'. The 'th' in the middle preserves the Greek theta, and the unstressed second syllable is the main spelling trap, since speakers often stress it incorrectly and reach for the wrong vowels.

How the word is built

• plethor- (from Greek plethore: fullness, repletion)
• -a (noun ending)