Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Very numerous; existing in great numbers.
  • adjective Consisting of many parts.
  • adjective Populous; crowded.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Consisting of a multitude or great number.
  • Of vast extent or number, or of manifold diversity; vast in number or variety, or in both.
  • Of or pertaining to the multitude.
  • Thronged; crowded.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Consisting of a multitude; manifold in number or condition.
  • adjective Of or pertaining to a multitude.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective crowded with many people

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective too numerous to be counted

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From Latin multitūdō, multitūdin-, multitude; see multitude.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From (the stem of) Latin multitūdō +‎ -ous.

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Examples

  • Its life, strong, splendid and multitudinous, is everywhere flavoured with that unaffected pessimism and constitutional melancholy which strike deepest root under the brightest skies and which sigh in the face of heaven: —

    The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night 2006

  • Coleridge, the profoundest of critics, calls him “an oceanic mind,” and this language, as expressing the idea of multitudinous unity, is none too big for him;

    Shakespeare His Life Art And Characters Hudson, H N 1872

  • Now, in precisely the same sense Darwin calls the multitudinous variations of plants and animals accidental.

    Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) An Exposition of the Darwinian Theory and a Discussion of Post-Darwinian Questions George John Romanes 1871

  • Coleridge, the profoundest of critics, calls him "an oceanic mind," and this language, as expressing the idea of multitudinous unity, is none too big for him; Hallam, the severest of critics, describes him as "thousand-souled," and this has grown into common use as no more than just; another writer makes his peculiarity to consist in "an infinite delicacy of mind"; and whatsoever of truth and fitness there may be in any or all of these expression's has a just exponent in his style.

    Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. With An Historical Sketch Of The Origin And Growth Of The Drama In England Henry Norman Hudson 1850

  • The sheer length of the word "multitudinous" in Shakespeare's line, "the multitudinous seas incarnadine," seems to express something of the vastness and prolixity of the seas; but would it if it were not used as an adjective describing the seas, and if it did not have just the meaning that it has?

    The Principles of Aesthetics Dewitt H. Parker

  • But it is more the grand curves of the cabbage that curl over cavernously like waves, and it is partly again that dreamy repetition, as of a pattern, that made two great poets, Eschylus and Shakespeare, use a word like "multitudinous" of the ocean.

    Alarms and Discursions 1905

  • And he had had a swift vision of his mother and brothers and sisters, their multitudinous wants, the house with its painting and repairing, its street assessments and taxes, and of the coming of children to him and Genevieve, and of his own daily wage in the sail-making loft.

    Chapter 2 2010

  • Had he been born fifty years later, Andrew Carnegie, the poor Scotch boy, might have risen to be president of his union, or of a federation of unions; but that he would never have become the builder of Homestead and the founder of multitudinous libraries, is as certain as it is certain that some other man would have developed the steel industry had Andrew Carnegie never been born.

    THE CLASS STRUGGLE 2010

  • Though the characters are strong and multitudinous, they serve more to trip each other up at times that help the story along.

    2010 April 07 « The BookBanter Blog 2010

  • A sea of vegetation laved the landscape, pouring its green billows from wall to wall, dripping from the cliff-lips in great vine-masses, and flinging a spray of ferns and air-plants in to the multitudinous crevices.

    Koolau the Leper 2010

Comments

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  • "I was trembling because I was recalling Bach's music which so often has something multitudinous about it--like waves and generations."

    --Theophilus North by Thornton Wilder

    September 6, 2010