IT’S ETYMOLOGY MONDAY—And this week’s word is:

myriad

Myriad, what a fantastic word to describe a great many things. Just how many, these days, is quite vague. For instance, when, in his Biographia Literaria publishedin 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge called Shakespeare “the greatest genius” and “myriad-minded”, his use of the word—and it’s the first instance recorded in English—was purely to express the vast reaches of Shakespeare’s mind. He didn’t specifically mean Shakespeare’s mind was of 10,000 things, but that number is precisely what myriad once meant. In Ancient Greek, myriados—10,000—was the greatest number expressed by one word. It was considered such a large number, for who would want to count that out, that it was commonly used to describe something perceived as great or indefinite, and it’s this sense of the word we remember today.