multus

Multus (MULL-tuss, "much, many, great") is one of the most thoroughly attested words in the Latin record: 20,784 occurrences across 371 works. A quantifier of this kind belongs to no genre and to all of them, and the top works bear that out — Livy's Ab Urbe Condita ("From the Founding of the City," 1,460), the Naturalis Historia ("Natural History," 1,233), the Institutio Oratoria ("The Orator's Education," 1,027), the Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales ("Moral Letters to Lucilius," 640), the Epistulae ad Familiares ("Letters to Friends," 560), and the Res Gestae (549). History, encyclopedia, rhetoric, philosophy, and correspondence: the word measures out quantity wherever Latin counts.

The lexica register a plain sense and an old form. Lewis & Short (A Latin Dictionary, 1879) glosses it "much, great, many," records the archaic moltus, and lays out the suppletive comparison the adjective carries — positive multus, comparative plus ("more"), superlative plurimus ("most") — noting frankly that its etymology is dubia, "doubtful." De Vaan (Etymological Dictionary of Latin, Brill 2008) gives "numerous, many" and marks it attested "Andr.+" (from that point onward), tracing a family of derivatives: multa, "penalty," and its verb multare, "to fine" (with the archaic moltare), so that the same root feeds both plenty and punishment.

Two etymology pointers are matched — de Vaan (Brill 2008, s.v. multus) and Ernout-Meillet (Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue latine, DELL, 1932; 4th ed. 1959, s.v. multus) — but the record supplies no reconstructed root from either; both merely mark the word as treated, and Lewis & Short call the origin doubtful.

The cited surfaces are all Livy, Book 1, and they show the word bending through its cases and degrees: multis, multas, multi, then plures ("more"), multoque, multorum, plus, multo — one lemma wearing many endings, counting the many.

If a word appears twenty thousand times to measure abundance, does it name the many, or only our need to count them?