mul·ti·tu·di·nous

(mŭl′tĭ-to͞od′n-əs, -tyo͞od′-)

adj.

1. Very numerous; existing in great numbers.

2. Consisting of many parts.

3. Populous; crowded.

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

mul′ti·tu′di·nous·ly adv.

mul′ti·tud′in·ous·ness n.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

multitudinousness - a very large number (especially of people)

numerosity, numerousness, multiplicity - a large number

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References in periodicals archive

[Suggests how, "in verse, Whitman quantifies ecstatically," and explores "how large numbers" became for Whitman "something of a poetic fetish"; goes on to examine what "Whitman's numbers tell us about the philosophy of his poetics" and probes the relation of mathematical abstraction to Whitman's love of the material: "In a poetics of the material multitude, does multitudinousness itself merit materiality?"]

Walt Whitman: a current bibliography

Approaching Aurora Leigh through its innovations in genre, Natasha Moore in "Epic and Novel: The Encyclopedic Impulse in Victorian Poetry" (Nineteenth-Century Literature, 68.3 [December 2013]: 396-422) uses the poem to demonstrate how Victorian poets conveyed the multitudinousness of their age--its rapid changes, heterogeneity, and sense of fragmentation--through hybridized genre, blending practices associated with the epic and the novel in a poem.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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