throng
/θɹɔŋ/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.80 in modern English
10
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
1
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "Not to know me argues yourselves unknown, The lowest of your throng."
- "Perhaps you suppose this throng / Can't keep it up all day long?"
- "Miss Phyllis Morgan, as the hapless heroine dressed in the shabbiest of clothes, appears in the midst of a gay and giddy throng; she apostrophises all and sundry there, including the villain, and has a magnificent scene which always brings down the house, and nightly adds to her histrionic laurels."
- "Here, mingled with the Persians, who were rushing to the higher ground with the same effort as ourselves, we remained motionless until sunrise of the next day, so crowded together that the bodies of the slain, held upright by the throng, could nowhere find room to fall, and that in front of me a soldier with his head cut in two, and split into equal halves by a powerful sword stroke, was so pressed on all sides that he stood erect like a stump."
- "I imagine throngs of people – well-dressed, sipping spritzes – in front of a boat that, to me, is a coffin which held 700 people."
- "On arrival at Edinburgh Waverley, I fight my way through the throngs of tourists and locals turning the place into a human anthill."
Etymology
From Middle English throng, thrang, from Old English þrang, ġeþrang (“crowd, press, tumult”), from Proto-Germanic *þrangwą, *þrangwō (“throng”), from *þrangwaz (“pressing, narrow”), from *þrinhwaną (“to press, to push; to force”), from Proto-Indo-European *trenkʷ- (“to beat; pound; hew; press”). Cognate with Dutch drang, German Drang. Compare also German Gedränge (“throng”) and Persian ترنجیدن (Trenjidan, “to beat, to push”). Compare typologically crowd (see there for more).
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: throng, þrang, *þrangwą, *trenkʷ-
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /θɹɔŋ/
- British English: /θɹɒŋ/