Okay, time to admit my ignorance ... at least one bit.
Which is correct?
myriad of daily details
or myriad daily details
I've checked several sites and am still confused.
Thanks in advance.
Okay, time to admit my ignorance ... at least one bit.
Which is correct?
myriad of daily details
or myriad daily details
I've checked several sites and am still confused.
Thanks in advance.
Both are considered acceptable in modern English. Style guides and dictionaries vary, with many accepting both the noun ('a myriad of…') and adjective ('myriad…') as proper.
From what I can find, Merriam-Webster expressly defends the noun form as 'older'. Oxford recognizes both. The AP Style guide prefers the adjective form. The Chicago Manual of Style is neutral.
Use whichever sounds best to you.
You could also test by substitution:
If "a multitude of daily details" or "a host of daily details" sounds natural, the noun form fits.
If "numerous daily details" or "countless daily details" flows better, the adjective form fits.
Or at least that's how it feels to me.
Englisch is my second language, so I looked it up in Wiktionary.
The noun has two different senses either an exact number (10,000) or a countless number or multitude (of specified things).
HM.
Not new to me, note there's also a symbol (‱), permyriad, meaning 'one part in 10,000' or 'percent of one percent' in the Unicode General Punctuation block
It's the same with "farther" and "further", as "farther" is seen as a non-specific measurement while "further" is merely a comparison (i.e. one is objective, the other is purely subjective, "a mile farther down the road" vs. "some distance further."
We have literal and figurative terms, which is also the use of adjectives and adverbs, as they can effectively serve both uses.
I'm more familiar with the noun form.
My oldest dictionary lists both, putting the 10,000 before the uncountable. But it qualifies the word with 'poetic, rhetoric', so it's one of those 100 dollar words.
AJ
Due to the way English steals words from other languages, we have words for every power of 10 up to 10,000,000, but it would be very strange for anybody to mix them. For example, if someone read 38,250,000 as "three krore, 8 million, 2 lakh, and 5 myriad" I would assume they were autistic or that they meant it as a joke.
The standard rule in fiction is you spell out any number under 100, yet the converse of that convention is that more than 10,000 are 'orders of magnitude' rather than specific figures (ex: "10,000^5").