Myriad
Encyclopedia
Myriad
Myriad ( (myrios, plural myriades), "numberless
countless, infinite", is a classical Greek
word for the number 10,000. In modern English
, the word refers to an unspecified large quantity.
, where there is plural.
In English, the term "myriad" is most commonly used to refer to a large number of an unspecified size. In this way "myriad" can be used as either a noun or an adjective. Thus both "there are myriad people outside" and "there is a myriad of people outside" are correct.
Merriam-Webster notes, "Recent criticism of the use of myriad as a noun, both in the plural form myriads and in the phrase a myriad of, seems to reflect a mistaken belief that the word was originally and is still properly only an adjective.... however, the noun is in fact the older form, dating to the 16th century. The noun myriad has appeared in the works of such writers as Milton
(plural myriads) and Thoreau
(a myriad of), and it continues to occur frequently in reputable English."
The Western numbering system divides large numbers into groups of three digits, and so the names for such numbers follow this division (10,000 = ten thousand). East Asian numbering divides large numbers into groups of four; so in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, 30,000 really would be "three myriad" (3,0000 - Japanese san-man - Chinese sān wàn (三萬/三万)) - Korean sahm mahn (삼만). One million
is a hundred
myriad (100 × 10000 instead of 1000 × 1000); the next uniquely named number after a myriad is 億 (Korean eok (억), Chinese pinyin yì, Japanese oku), which is myriad myriad (10000 × 10000) or a hundred million.
Modern Greek still uses the word "myriad" by itself, but also to form the word for million. The word for million is ekatommyrio (hundred myriad — εκατομμύριο); one thousand million is disekatommyrio (twice hundred myriad — δισεκατομμύριο).
The largest number named in Ancient Greek
was a myriad myriad and
Archimedes of Syracuse
used this quantity as the basis for a numeration system
of large powers of ten, which he needed to count grains of sand, see The Sand Reckoner
.
There is only slight indication that "myria" has at all been used as a metric prefix for 10,000, e.g., 10 kilometres = 1 myriametre. It does not have official status as an SI prefix
.
In Sweden and Norway, one mile
= 10,000 metres = one myriametre. Before they went metric, one Swedish mile was 10,688 metres and a Norwegian mile was 11,295 metres, so only a small change had to be made to the old mile to make them equal to one myriametre. Even today, both Swedes and Norwegians use the 10,000 metre mile ("mil") to refer to travel distances in everyday language.
In Great Britain, the Ordnance Survey
use the term myriad
to refer to a 100 km × 100 km area in the National Grid
.
, words equivalent to Greek myriad (10,000) derive from the same Chinese character
, "萬", or "万" in the simplified form. The pronunciations
of this character vary across linguistic areas. In Mandarin Chinese, it is pronounced as wàn, while various sounds are associated with the same character in various dialects
of the Chinese language
including the Cantonese
, Hakka, and Min Nan
dialects. The Japanese
pronunciation is man, the Korean
, man (written as 만 in hangul
), and the Vietnamese
, vạn.
The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages also have words for a myriad squared (100,000,000): yì (億) (or wànwàn [萬萬] in ancient texts), oku (億), and eok (억/億), respectively. A myriad cubed (10,0003 or 1012) is a zhào (兆), chō (兆), and jo (조/兆); a myriad to the fourth power (10,0004 or 1016) is a jīng (京), kei (京), and gyeong (경/京), respectively. Conversely, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean do not have single words for a thousand to the second, third, fifth power, etc., unlike English and many other European languages.
Myriad ( (myrios, plural myriades), "numberless
countless, infinite", is a classical Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
word for the number 10,000. In modern English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, the word refers to an unspecified large quantity.
History and usage
A myriad is primarily a singular cardinal number; just as the "thousand" in "four thousand" is singular (one does not write "four thousands people") the word myriad is used in the same way: "there are four myriad people outside". When used as a noun, meaning "a large number", it follows the same rules as that phrase. However, that is not the case originally in GreekGreek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
, where there is plural.
In English, the term "myriad" is most commonly used to refer to a large number of an unspecified size. In this way "myriad" can be used as either a noun or an adjective. Thus both "there are myriad people outside" and "there is a myriad of people outside" are correct.
Merriam-Webster notes, "Recent criticism of the use of myriad as a noun, both in the plural form myriads and in the phrase a myriad of, seems to reflect a mistaken belief that the word was originally and is still properly only an adjective.... however, the noun is in fact the older form, dating to the 16th century. The noun myriad has appeared in the works of such writers as Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
(plural myriads) and Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...
(a myriad of), and it continues to occur frequently in reputable English."
The Western numbering system divides large numbers into groups of three digits, and so the names for such numbers follow this division (10,000 = ten thousand). East Asian numbering divides large numbers into groups of four; so in Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, 30,000 really would be "three myriad" (3,0000 - Japanese san-man - Chinese sān wàn (三萬/三万)) - Korean sahm mahn (삼만). One million
Million
One million or one thousand thousand, is the natural number following 999,999 and preceding 1,000,001. The word is derived from the early Italian millione , from mille, "thousand", plus the augmentative suffix -one.In scientific notation, it is written as or just 106...
is a hundred
100 (number)
100 is the natural number following 99 and preceding 101.-In mathematics:One hundred is the square of 10...
myriad (100 × 10000 instead of 1000 × 1000); the next uniquely named number after a myriad is 億 (Korean eok (억), Chinese pinyin yì, Japanese oku), which is myriad myriad (10000 × 10000) or a hundred million.
Modern Greek still uses the word "myriad" by itself, but also to form the word for million. The word for million is ekatommyrio (hundred myriad — εκατομμύριο); one thousand million is disekatommyrio (twice hundred myriad — δισεκατομμύριο).
The largest number named in Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
was a myriad myriad and
Archimedes of Syracuse
Archimedes
Archimedes of Syracuse was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Among his advances in physics are the foundations of hydrostatics, statics and an...
used this quantity as the basis for a numeration system
of large powers of ten, which he needed to count grains of sand, see The Sand Reckoner
The Sand Reckoner
The Sand Reckoner is a work by Archimedes in which he set out to determine an upper bound for the number of grains of sand that fit into the universe. In order to do this, he had to estimate the size of the universe according to the then-current model, and invent a way to talk about extremely...
.
There is only slight indication that "myria" has at all been used as a metric prefix for 10,000, e.g., 10 kilometres = 1 myriametre. It does not have official status as an SI prefix
SI prefix
The International System of Units specifies a set of unit prefixes known as SI prefixes or metric prefixes. An SI prefix is a name that precedes a basic unit of measure to indicate a decadic multiple or fraction of the unit. Each prefix has a unique symbol that is prepended to the unit symbol...
.
In Sweden and Norway, one mile
Norwegian/Swedish mil
A mil is a unit of distance, most often used to measure geographic distance, very common in Norway and Sweden. Today, it measures by definition 10 kilometres, but earlier in history it had different values....
= 10,000 metres = one myriametre. Before they went metric, one Swedish mile was 10,688 metres and a Norwegian mile was 11,295 metres, so only a small change had to be made to the old mile to make them equal to one myriametre. Even today, both Swedes and Norwegians use the 10,000 metre mile ("mil") to refer to travel distances in everyday language.
In Great Britain, the Ordnance Survey
Ordnance Survey
Ordnance Survey , an executive agency and non-ministerial government department of the Government of the United Kingdom, is the national mapping agency for Great Britain, producing maps of Great Britain , and one of the world's largest producers of maps.The name reflects its creation together with...
use the term myriad
Myriad (unit of area)
A myriad is an area 100 km × 100 km square i.e. it is 10,000 square kilometer. 100 of these squares would be one million square kilometers....
to refer to a 100 km × 100 km area in the National Grid
British national grid reference system
The Ordnance Survey National Grid reference system is a system of geographic grid references used in Great Britain, different from using latitude and longitude....
.
Sinosphere
In the SinosphereSinosphere
In areal linguistics, Sinosphere refers to a grouping of countries and regions that are currently inhabited with a majority of Chinese population or were historically under Chinese cultural influence...
, words equivalent to Greek myriad (10,000) derive from the same Chinese character
Chinese character
Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...
, "萬", or "万" in the simplified form. The pronunciations
Pronunciation
Pronunciation refers to the way a word or a language is spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If one is said to have "correct pronunciation", then it refers to both within a particular dialect....
of this character vary across linguistic areas. In Mandarin Chinese, it is pronounced as wàn, while various sounds are associated with the same character in various dialects
Dialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
of the Chinese language
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
including the Cantonese
Cantonese
Cantonese is a dialect spoken primarily in south China.Cantonese may also refer to:* Yue Chinese, the Chinese language that includes Cantonese* Cantonese cuisine, the cuisine of Guangdong province...
, Hakka, and Min Nan
Min Nan
The Southern Min languages, or Min Nan , are a family of Chinese languages spoken in southern Fujian, eastern Guangdong, Hainan, Taiwan, and southern Zhejiang provinces of China, and by descendants of emigrants from these areas in diaspora....
dialects. The Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
pronunciation is man, the Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
, man (written as 만 in hangul
Hangul
Hangul,Pronounced or ; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl or 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul the Korean alphabet, is the native alphabet of the Korean language. It is a separate script from Hanja, the logographic Chinese characters which are also sometimes used to write Korean...
), and the Vietnamese
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
, vạn.
The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages also have words for a myriad squared (100,000,000): yì (億) (or wànwàn [萬萬] in ancient texts), oku (億), and eok (억/億), respectively. A myriad cubed (10,0003 or 1012) is a zhào (兆), chō (兆), and jo (조/兆); a myriad to the fourth power (10,0004 or 1016) is a jīng (京), kei (京), and gyeong (경/京), respectively. Conversely, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean do not have single words for a thousand to the second, third, fifth power, etc., unlike English and many other European languages.
Other languages
- AmharicAmharic languageAmharic is a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia. It is the second most-spoken Semitic language in the world, after Arabic, and the official working language of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Thus, it has official status and is used nationwide. Amharic is also the official or working...
: ′əlf (እልፍ) - HebrewHebrew languageHebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
: revava (רבבה) - MalayalamMalayalam languageMalayalam , is one of the four major Dravidian languages of southern India. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India with official language status in the state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Pondicherry. It is spoken by 35.9 million people...
: Ayutham (അയുതം) - TamilTamil languageTamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...
: Mudivili - TeluguTelugu languageTelugu is a Central Dravidian language primarily spoken in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, where it is an official language. It is also spoken in the neighbouring states of Chattisgarh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Orissa and Tamil Nadu...
: Challa - ThaiThai languageThai , also known as Central Thai and Siamese, is the national and official language of Thailand and the native language of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family. Historical linguists have been unable to definitively...
: meun (หมื่น) - TurkicTurkic languagesThe Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...
: tümen
See also
- -yllion-yllion-yllion is a proposal from Donald Knuth for the terminology and symbols of an alternate decimal superbase system. In it, he adapts the familiar English terms for large numbers to provide a systematic set of names for much larger numbers...
- Chinese numeralsChinese numeralsChinese numerals are characters for writing numbers in Chinese. Today speakers of Chinese use three numeral systems:the ubiquitous Arabic numerals and two indigenous systems....
- Indian numbering systemIndian numbering systemThe South Asian numbering system, used today in the Indian subcontinent , is based on grouping by two decimal places, rather than the three decimal places commonplace in most parts of the world. This system of measurement introduces separators into numbers in places appropriate to the two-digit...
- Japanese numeralsJapanese numeralsThe system of Japanese numerals is the system of number names used in the Japanese language. The Japanese numerals in writing are entirely based on the Chinese numerals and the grouping of large numbers follow the Chinese tradition of grouping by 10,000...
- Myriad (typeface)Myriad (typeface)Myriad is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Robert Slimbach and Carol Twombly for Adobe Systems. The typeface is best known for its usage by Apple Inc., replacing Apple Garamond as Apple's corporate font since 2002. Myriad is easily distinguished from other sans-serif fonts due to its...
- Myriad (unit of area)Myriad (unit of area)A myriad is an area 100 km × 100 km square i.e. it is 10,000 square kilometer. 100 of these squares would be one million square kilometers....