The first thing we are going to do, before entering fully into the meaning of the term multitude, is discover its etymological origin. In this case, it must be emphasized that it derives from Latin, specifically from “multitudo”, which can be translated as “crowd” and is the result of the sum of the following lexical components:
-The word “multus”, which is synonymous with “a lot”.
-The suffix “-tud”, which can be used to indicate “quality”.
The concept is used to refer to a large number of individuals or elements .
For example: “The team was received by a crowd of fans at the airport,” “A crowd came out to protest after the government's announcement,” “A crowd was expected, but in the end barely a hundred people attended the festival.”
There is no specific number from which a group of people can be considered to constitute a crowd. Generally the notion is used according to the context: while ten young people playing sports in a park are not a crowd, those same ten boys sharing a dormitory are a crowd in that setting.
The notion of crowd is often used in political science to refer to the multiplicity of individuals who act together to influence a system . Citizens who are part of the crowd do not lose their individuality beyond collective action that represents common interests.
It is considered, at a political or sociological level, that a crowd is a gregarious concentration whose members have different origins and characteristics. A crowd protesting against an authoritarian regime, for example, can be made up of the poor, members of the middle class , and even wealthy individuals.
It should be noted that many objects or animals together also form a multitude: “My girlfriend has a multitude of shoes in her bedroom” , “A multitude of lobsters surprised the inhabitants of the area” , “You cannot take a multitude of books on the trip: Pick two or three and keep them in your bag.”
Starting from the above, we can emphasize that among the words that can function as synonyms for multitude, some stand out such as crowd, agglomeration, people, mob, plebs, abundance, infinity, quantity, endless, innumerable...
On the contrary, among its antonyms we find terms such as penury or scarcity, for example.
In the same way, we can indicate that there are many works that use the term that concerns us now in their titles. A good example of this is the book “The wandering multitude”, which is written by the Colombian author Laura Restrepo (1950).
It was published in 2003 and tells a plot that takes as its setting a hostel for pilgrims. There their lives intertwine: a foreigner, who works for an organization that defends human rights; a woman who disappeared in the context of a war and a man who is in love with her and who has not hesitated to look for her.
Another example is the book “Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire,” which was published in 2005 and is written by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.