Word.ws English Dictionary

plethora

UK/ˈplɛθəɹə//ˈplɛθəɹə/

plethora noun: an excessive amount or number; an abundance.

Noun

plethora (countable and uncountable, plural plethorae or plethoras)

  1. (usually) An excessive amount or number; an abundance.
    • The menu offers a plethora of cuisines from around the world.
    • He labours under a plethora of wit and imagination.1817, Francis Jeffrey, review of Lalla Rookh, in the Edinburgh Review
  2. Excess of blood in the skin, especially in the face and especially chronically.
    • [Y]our Character at Present is like a Person in a Plethora, absolutely dying of too much Health—1777, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal, IV.iii
    • The food necessary for the maintenance of his dog, a bull-terrier, in the condition of ferocious plethora to which it was accustomed, he generously declared himself willing to pay for out of his own pocket, […]1953, Samuel Beckett, Watt, [Paris]: Olympia Press, →OCLC

plethora meaning in Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam and Kannada

plethora in Tamil

நிரம்பல நிலை, பெருவளம்

plethora in Urdu

بہتات, کثرت, شدت

plethora in Malayalam

abundance, excess, superabundance
അതിരേകം, ആധിക്യം, അമിതത്വം, സുഭിക്ഷത, അധികത, ധാരാളം

plethora in Kannada

ಹೆಗ್ಗಳವಾದುದು, ಉರೆ ಹೆಚ್ಚುಗೆಯಾದುದು

Examples of plethora in a sentence

  • I pushed my seat right up before the most insolent gazer, a short fat man, with a plethora of cravat round his neck, and fixing my gaze on his, gave him more gazes than he sent.1849, Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage. […], 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], →OCLC:
  • Meanwhile other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary plethora of trash like Marquis von Grosse's Horrid Mysteries..., there arose many memorable weird works both in English and German.1927, H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (The Aftermath of Gothic Fiction):
  • The story of the woodhen is one outstanding conservation triumph in a plethora of tragedy.2005, Sean Dooley, The Big Twitch, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, page 233:

All 16 example sentences with plethora

Synonyms of plethora

All synonyms of plethora

Forms of plethora

pluralplethorae
pluralplethoras

Origin of plethora

Borrowed from Late Latin plēthōra, from Ancient Greek πληθώρα (plēthṓra, “fullness, satiety”), from πλήθω (plḗthō, “to be full”) + -η (-ē, nominal suffix).

Words formed from plethora

Words that rhyme with plethora

13 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about plethora

What does plethora mean?
Plethora means an excessive amount or number; an abundance.
What is plethora in Tamil?
Plethora in Tamil is நிரம்பல நிலை, பெருவளம். See Plethora meaning in Tamil.
How do you use plethora in a sentence?
I pushed my seat right up before the most insolent gazer, a short fat man, with a plethora of cravat round his neck, and fixing my gaze on his, gave him more gazes than he sent.
What part of speech is plethora?
Plethora is a noun.
How do you pronounce plethora?
Plethora is pronounced /ˈplɛθəɹə/ (UK).
What is the plural of plethora?
The plural of plethora is plethorae.

Words near plethora in the dictionary

  1. plethodontid
  2. plethodontids
  3. Plethon
  4. Plethonian
  5. Plethonic
  6. plethora
  7. plethorae
  8. plethoral
  9. plethoras
  10. plethoretic
  11. plethoric

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: plethora (page history and authors); plethora (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); plethora (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); plethora (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); plethora (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-plethora.ogg, en-au-plethora.ogg.

Cite this entry: “plethora.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/plethora. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.