Myriad

This isn't going to be a blog about words, I promise.

The 2007 365 New Words a Year Page-A-Day Calendar (the word new in this sense is open to interpretation) features words taken from the Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. The May 29th entry lists the following:

myriad

n 1: ten thousand *2: a great number

*The newspaper office received a myriad of e-mails pointing out the three incorrect clues in Sunday’s crossword puzzle.

DID YOU KNOW?
In English, the “ten thousand” sense of “myriad” mostly appears in references to ancient Greece, as in the following from Thirwall’s History of Greece: “4,000 men from Peloponnesus had fought at Thermopylae with 300 myriads.” More often, however, English-speakers use “myriad” in the broad sense, both as a singular noun (“a myriad of tiny particles”) and as a plural noun (“myriads of tiny particles”). “Myriad” can also serve as an adjective meaning “innumerable” (“myriad particles”). “Myriad” derives from Greek myrias, which in turn comes from myrioi (“countless” or “ten thousand”). A relative of “myriad” is “myriapod,” which descends in part from the Greek word for “foot” and refers to a creature with many feet—a centipede or millipede, that is.

Now, just like decimate and , myriad first indicated a specific number (in this case, 10,000). Like the quote from Thirwall above, it helped with large numbers. And since the first definition is "ten thousand", purists don't like to use an article in front of it, nor a conjunction after. They maintain that you wouldn't say "a myriad of tiny particles" any more than you would say "a ten thousand of tiny particles". You would simply say "I had myriad tiny particles".