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Plethora   /plˈɛθərə/  /pləθˈɔrə/   Listen
Plethora

noun
1.
Extreme excess.  Synonyms: embarrassment, overplus, superfluity.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Plethora" Quotes from Famous Books



... named—the lightness of their air-filled bodies, and the strength of their chest-packed muscles. Where light air is circulated instead of heavy blood, great vascularity serves only to make existence more ethereal. Plethora probably takes the insect nearer to the skies, instead of dragging it towards the dust. The hawk-moth, with its burly body, may often be seen hovering gracefully, on quivering wings, over some favourite flower, as if it were hung there ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various

... of money and with such uncertainty as to its future value, the ordinary motives for saving and care diminished, And a loose luxury spread throughout the country. A still worse outgrowth was the increase of speculation and gambling. With the plethora of paper currency in 1791 appeared the first evidences of that cancerous disease which always follows large issues of irredeemable currency,—a disease more permanently injurious to a nation than war, pestilence ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White

... fretting, to the spleen, and from the inordinate vigour of the liver; hence it is that the relief cannot come at the proper time and season. Has not your lady, may I ask, heretofore at the period of the catamenia, suffered, if indeed not from anaemia, then necessarily from plethora? Am I right in ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... fyr' (2702), S. emends to 'a aet fyr' when the fire began to grow less intense afterward. This emendation relieves the passage of a plethora of ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin

... doctor: I'm such a miserable object, that even disease passes by me with contempt. If I ever am in your list, I presume it will be for a case of plethora," replied Jerry, spanning his ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat

... much, too many; superabundance, superfluity, superfluence|, saturation; nimiety[obs3], transcendency, exuberance, profuseness; profusion &c. (plenty) 639; repletion, enough in all conscience, satis superque[Lat], lion's share; more than enough &c. 639; plethora, engorgement, congestion, load, surfeit, sickener[obs3]; turgescence &c. (expansion) 194[obs3]; overdose, overmeasure[obs3], oversupply, overflow; inundation &c. (water) 348; avalanche. accumulation &c. (store) 636; heap &c. 72; drug, drug in the market; glut; crowd; burden. excess; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... the watchword of the Glasgow School of Art. Whistler's "Carlyle" hangs in the Corporation Galleries, and it was the stylist, Lavery, who secured the tedious commission to commemorate Her Majesty's opening of the Glasgow Exhibition by the usual plethora of portraits. It would have made a more interesting picture had Mr. Lavery perpetuated the fact—so pregnant a contribution to the philosophy of Exhibitions—that a profit of L10,000 was derived from the switchbacks. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... her fellow-beings that she was not giving them, or that she owed anything to herself that she was not giving to herself. The expenses of building and of the improvements to her spacious grounds had been of so much assistance in removing the plethora of her income that she was greatly encouraged. She felt that she now had her fortune under control, and that she herself might be able to manage it for the future. Already she was making her plans for ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton

... effects of alcohol, owing to its stimulant properties, produce an unnatural susceptibility to morbid action in all the organs, and this, with the plethora superinduced, becomes a fertile ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur

... referred all diseases to debility, and, with a proper contempt for symptomatic treatment, went to the root of the matter with port wine and bark; Pilgrim was persuaded that the evil principle in the human system was plethora, and he made war against it with cupping, blistering, and cathartics. They had both been long established in Milby, and as each had a sufficient practice, there was no very malignant rivalry between them; on the contrary, they had that sort ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... gives most strength; but its stimulancy excites fever, and produces plethora and its consequences. The system is sooner worn out by a repetition of its stimuli, and those who indulge greatly in such diet are more likely to be carried off early by inflammatory diseases; or if, by judicious exercise, they qualify its effects, they yet acquire such an accumulation ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott

... chance of escape for Thomas Clarke Luby or for his associates. The crown had a plethora of evidence against them, acquired during the months and years when they appeared to be all but totally ignorant of the existence of the conspiracy. They had the evidence of the approver, Nagle, who had been an employe of ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various

... luxury and congestion of wealth in the head of the body corporate, while its lowest limbs are in rags and pallid mortification, should be permitted by the head, blinded by plethora, and peacefully endured by the limbs, dispirited by inanition, is an astounding marvel. But there are twinges of pain now and then. The very quiet is only that of syncope, and any day it may be broken by a wild and furious paroxysm. Unless the permission ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... tolerance to arsenic exhibited by some German mountaineers, or the peculiar safety enjoyed by the butcher class from attacks of continued fever;[74] but these exemptions are purchased at the expense of the future, the effects of arsenic, long continued, finally having its morbid effects, and the very plethora which is the bulwark of resistance in the butcher, this plethora being in the end a treacherous foe, diseases result from it which make a sudden ending to this class when ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... Your present plethora of acquirements will soon cure itself. Knowledge that is not wanted dies out like the eyes of the fishes of the Mammoth Cave. When you come to handle life and death as your daily business, your memory will of itself bid good-by to such inmates as the well-known ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... half an hour Gillian succeeded in extracting Michael's address from amid the plethora of words and, bidding the voluble concierge bon jour, she and ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler

... make friends with him as the winter birds had done; and if they did, would they be as fickle? For, with the running sap, creeping worm, and winging bug, most of Freckles' "chickens" had deserted him, entered the swamp, and feasted to such a state of plethora on its store that they cared little for his supply, so that in the strenuous days of mating and nest-building the boy ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter

... pretend that there was a chance that she might find some one waiting her arrival on the platform, but at the bottom of her heart she had little hope of such a possibility. As members of a large family whose parents were not rich enough to pay for the modern plethora of nurses and governesses, the Garnetts and Vernons had been brought up to be independent, and to fend for themselves, hence the two mothers would not be so anxious to count the number of their brood, to see that each member was safe and sound, as would have been the ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... contrast, due to, or connected with, this plethora of yolk, is the differentiation of a yolk sac ( umbilical vesicle) and the development of two new structures, the amnion and allantois, in the fowl. If the student will compare Figure 10 of the frog, he will see that the developing tadpole encloses in its abdomen all the yolk provided ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells

... to your charming family, give Wentworth my love, and tell Mlle. Cesarine I owe her a grudge which I shall never forget. She clearly suspected me. You are much too rich, dear Charles; I relieve your plethora. I bleed you financially. Therefore ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen

... such strong picturesque passages as the swimming-match that Wackerbarth's style is worst. There is a plethora of adjectives, scarcely one of which is found in the original; but they are of no avail—they are too commonplace to render the strength and raciness of the original words. There is too much ballad padding—'then ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker

... invasion. Will they permanently acquiesce in restraints not imposed on the Channel Islands? Irishmen, Unionists no less than Home Rulers, are mostly Protectionists, and believe that tariffs may give to Ireland, not indeed a 'plethora of wealth,' for of this no man out of Bedlam except Mr. Gladstone dreams, but reasonable prosperity. Vain to argue that Protection is folly. Englishmen think so, and Englishmen are right. But English doctrine is not accepted in Germany, ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey

... range recedes and is of much lower elevation, and to these facts perhaps is to be attributed our modified rainfall compared with the plethora of the immediate North; but we get our share, and when people deplore the droughts which devastate Australia, let it be remembered that Australia is huge, and the most rigorous of Australian droughts merely ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... doctors with bushy eyebrows, who wore dogskin gloves in Summer and who coughed when you asked them a question—gaining time to formulate a reply—didn't know much more about measles, mumps, chicken-pox and whooping-cough than she did herself. Philadelphia has always had a plethora of Medical Journals and dogmatic doctors. Living in Philadelphia and having had a little experience with doctors, Mrs. Abbey let them severely alone and prescribed the pediluvium, hop-tea, sulphur and molasses and a roll-up ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... tomahawk, inflicting Repeal gashes, they bid the prostrate and panting state subject rejoice over the wondrous dispatch with which its parts can be dismembered, the arithmetical accuracy with which its financial plethora can be depleted. Eccentric in its motions and universal in its aspirations, for the genius of this age no conception is too mean, no subject too intricate, no enterprise too rash, no object too sacred. It will condescend ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... nobody (except perhaps Mr. Davidson himself) would know my dishonesty. For indeed and out of doubt he is in some respects the most richly-endowed of all our younger poets. Of wit and of imagination he has almost a plethora: they crowd this book, and all his books, from end to end. And his frequent felicity of phrase is hardly less remarkable. You may turn page after page, and with each page the truth of this will become more obvious. Let me add his quick eye for ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... the "Venus" and the "Lucrece," said finely of Shakespeare "Shakespeare could not have written an Epic; he would have died of plethora of thought." This prodigality of nature is exemplified equally in his Sonnets. The copious selection here given (which from the wealth of the material, required greater consideration than any other portion of the Editor's task) contains many that will not be ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... for if we make a mistake, instead of preventing, we shall accelerate the disease. For instance, the first slight disturbance of the functions which rises from a sthenic state, often resembles those verging towards a state of debility or asthenia. I have seen various instances arising from plethora, or a sthenic state, where the patient complained of depression of spirits, and inability to move; and, in short, from his own account was labouring under asthenic diathesis: but by inquiring carefully into the action of the exciting causes, examining ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett

... exigencies of monthly publication. Moreover, as is shown in the evidence given later on during his lawsuit with the Revue de Paris, he would sometimes, in his haste for money, accept new engagements when he already had a plethora of work in hand. Nevertheless, whatever the failures to fulfil a contract on his part might be, he was implacable towards those who did not rightly discharge their obligations to him; and Pichot was never forgiven. In September, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... of melancholy cannot but possess those who remain after the last polka is polked, the last light in the last ball-room is extinguished, and the summer ended. At length the railway engine whistles at long intervals; the mail-bags lose their plethora; the parish preachers, shorn of occasional help, knuckle to new sermons; the servants disperse; the head waiter retires to private life, and the dipper-boy disappears in the shades of the pine forests; the Indians pack up their duds, and, like the Arab, silently steal away; while the landlords ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn

... soon be carried through the valley of Seba Biar; and the surplus produce of the Delta would again seek for a market on the shores of the Red Sea and in Arabia. Until these things happen, even should a canal be excavated, whether from Cairo to Suez, or from Suez to Tineh, during some pecuniary plethora in the city, we venture to predict that the Suez canal shares, or Mohammedan bonds, will be as disreputable a security as honest Jonathan's American repudiated stock, or the Greek bonds of King Otho not countersigned ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... can procure to bombast and extravagance, which are the death of taste. In other countries, however, as well as in China, I have seen some of the most boasted feats, either outgrowing their beauty from a plethora of their owner's wealth, or becoming capricious and hypocondriacal by a quackish application of it. A few fine places, even in England, might be pointed out that are labouring under these disorders; not to mention ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... were proceeding at a pace necessarily slow. One of them was a bluff, fresh-complexioned man, of about sixty summers; but although of a healthy look, and a frame that had evidently once been vigorous, yet he was a good deal stooped, had about him all the impotence of plethora, and his hair, which fell down his shoulders, was white as snow. The other, who rode pretty close to him, was much about his own age, or perhaps a few years older, if one could judge by a face that gave more undeniable ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... shed behind the house showed him no plethora of firewood. But here was ax, shovel, and saw, and he asked no more. First he shoveled out a path along the eaves of the house where she might walk in sentry fashion to take the deep breaths of clear sharp air he insisted upon. He made it wide enough so that her skirt would not ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine

... welcome to him, and he courts their banishment of the past his old fiancee had dragged from its sepulchre. Bury it again and forget it! "What's all the noise about? What's all the chatterboxing?" For the good gentleman always imputes to his offspring a volubility and a plethora of language far in excess of any meaning it conveys. His own attitude, he implies, is one of weighty consideration ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... some persons, especially those persons who consider that to enjoy life a superabundance or even a plethora of material comforts are necessary, who, after reading a description of the home and fare of the Japanese peasant, will assume that his life is a burden and that he derives no enjoyment whatever from it. Nothing could be more erroneous. There is probably not a more joyous being on the ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... which it is not necessary to detail in this place, it may be seen that the causes assigned by physiologists, and the plans proposed by cultivators for the production of double flowers, are reducible to three heads, which may be classed under Plethora, Starvation, and Sterility. These three seem inconsistent one with the other, but are not so much so as they at first sight ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters

... applied to the extremities and over the abdomen; abundance of fresh air should be secured by opening windows and doors, and preventing unnecessary crowding of persons around; cold water may be dashed on the face and chest; and if there be plethora, with full bounding pulse, with evidence of cerebral or other internal congestion, the abstraction of a few ounces of blood ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs

... subject she troubles herself but little. This good old woman comes into my mind, whenever I hear an attempt made to account for all the maladies of the social body, by some trivial form of words. It is superabundance of produce, tyranny of capital, industrial plethora, or other such nonsense, of which, it would be fortunate if we could say: Verba et voces praetereaque nihil, for these are errors ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat

... population actively employed in the South, as there was in the North, the inflation of currency might have been temporarily concealed by its rapid passage from hand to hand. But with no such demand—with only the daily necessities of the household and of the person to relieve—the plethora of these promises to pay naturally resulted, first in sluggishness, then in a complete ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... but the clothes, the books and the money satisfy the reader's mind like things to eat. We are dealing here with the old cut-and-dry, legitimate interest of treasure trove. But even treasure trove can be made dull. There are few people who have not groaned under the plethora of goods that fell to the lot of the SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON, that dreary family. They found article after article, creature after creature, from milk kine to pieces of ordnance, a whole consignment; but no informing taste had presided ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Lambert be of their creed, for he does not use the 'thee' and 'thou' when speaking as do all Quakers, so I am told; but his empty pockets, a smattering of learning which he has picked up the Lord knows where, and a plethora of unspoken grievances, have all proved a sure passport to ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy

... Arab cemetery in the desert, and to the Bisharin village where wild, dark creatures (whose hair was pinned with arrows and whose ancestors were mentioned in the Bible) sold baskets and bracelets and what not. There were really, as Sir John Biddell remarked, a "plethora of sights," not counting the magnificent Rock Tombs, since the Set had definitely "struck" against tombs of all descriptions. But even with an excursion to the ancient quarries, for a look at half-finished ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... regretted its easy scramble, and its plethora of civilized concomitants; for he loved the mountains, the streams, the open forests, and the physical struggles of the wild places; but—and he gave over reasoning, and knew that it was because of the charm of Miss Presby herself, and that he wanted ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton

... present day, we, of the easier classes, are in a state of surfeit and disgrace after meat. Plethora has filled us with indifference; and we are covered from head to foot with the callosities of habitual opulence. Born into what is called a certain rank, we live, as the saying is, up to our station. We squander without enjoyment, because our fathers squandered. We eat ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... us a book replete with interesting matter; and yet, owing to some lack of intellectual mastery in him over his materials, it leaves a singularly vague and dispiriting impression on the mind in reading it. The author has a plethora of knowledge in regard to the surface changes in history, but no insight whatever apparently into the meaning of history itself, into the philosophic causes which these changes attest and obey. He is a man of uncommon bulk, but deficient muscle. His ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... mostly of herself, and intense selfishness is apparent even in her humility. The tragedy of her life lay in that she had a surplus of time and a plethora of money, and these paved the way for introspection and fatty enlargement of the ego. Let her tell her ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... delicately tinted, on the walls; with furniture chosen for comfort as well as elegance, and no more of it than was absolutely necessary, no crowding of chairs and tables, no congestion of useless ornaments, no plethora of pictures, putting each other out—only two, in fact, one a summer seascape, with tiny waves bursting on shining sands; the other a corner of a beautiful old garden, shady with trees, glowing with flowers, whence two young lovers, sitting on an old stone seat, looked out with dreamy ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand



Words linked to "Plethora" :   overplus, inordinateness, plethoric, superfluity, excessiveness, excess, redundancy, redundance



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