Plethora? Myriad? Enough, already

Plethora and Myriad: These two sound like a couple of heroines from a Greek tragedy. I’m sure they have their place in the richness of poetry and literature. But in business they get in the way of clear writing and slow down your readers’ journey through your website. People who don’t have the Latin, or the Greek, or whose first language is not English, will stumble on these words and wonder what on earth you are talking about.

Trust me: if you have lots of whatever it is you offer – ideas, shower heads, shoes, activities – all you need to say is ‘many’, and show a sample of your best ones.

In any case, plethora doesn’t just mean ‘many’. It means, according to Word Wise’s Dan Santow:

‘too freakin’ many’

and to Oxford Dictionaries:

‘an excessive amount of’

In medical terms, the Online Etymology Dictionary says a plethora is an excess of body fluids, from the Greek plethore, meaning ‘fullness’.

Yuk! Pass the AquaBan, someone!

Myriad has its roots in number. A very big number:

noun

1 a countless or extremely great number of people or things

2 (chiefly in classical history) a unit of ten thousand

adjective

countless or extremely great in number:

having countless or very many elements or aspects 
(Oxford Dictionaries)

So if you say, for example:

• We have a plethora of bathroom design ideas for you to consider; or
• We have a myriad of bathroom design ideas for you to consider…

either way, you’ve got too many there and you need to narrow down the options. Use your design and technical expertise to guide your reader in the right direction.

Otherwise, your reader can still expect to be ploughing through your brochure a year next Tuesday. That’s a lot of bandwidth for them to download!