mass
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Pronunciation: ipa: /mæs/
note: Hong Kong, Indic
ipa: /mɑːs/
Forms: form: masser
form: massest
Etymology: In late Middle English (circa 1400) as masse in the sense of "lump, quantity of matter", from Anglo-Norman masse, in Old French attested from the 11th century, via late Latin massa (“lump, dough”), from Ancient Greek μᾶζα (mâza, “barley-cake, lump (of dough)”). The Greek noun may be derived from the verb μάσσω (mássō, “to knead”), ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European *maǵ- (“to oil, knead”), although this is uncertain. Doublet of masa.
The sense of "a large number or quantity" arises circa 1580. The scientific sense is from 1687 (as Latin massa) in the works of Isaac Newton, with the first English use (as mass) occurring in 1704.
Senses: examples: text: There is evidence of mass extinctions in the distant past.
text: The national liberation movement had not yet developed to a sufficiently mass scale.
ref: 1988, V. V. Zagladin, Vitaly Baskakov, International Working Class and Communist Movement: Historical Record, 1830s to Mid-1940s, page 236:
text: With perhaps unprecedented magnitude and clarity, Auschwitz brings theologians and philosophers face to face with the facts of suffering on an incredibly mass scale, with issues poignantly raised concerning the absence of divine intervention or the inadequacies of divine power or benevolence; […].
ref: 1989, Creighton Peden, Larry E. Axel (editors), God, Values, and Empiricism: Issues in Philosophical Theology, page 2:
text: The air arms did more than provide the warring nations with individual heroes, for their individual exploits occurred within the context of an increasingly mass aerial effort in a war of the masses.
ref: 2010, John Horne, A Companion to World War I, page 159:
glosses: Involving a mass of things; concerning a large quantity or number.
examples: text: Mass unemployment resulted from the financial collapse.
text: Every agency is sold on use of mass media today — or at least, it thinks it is — and what can be "masser" than television?
ref: 1958, Child Welfare, volume 37, page 2:
text: While agreeing with Bell on the unlikelihood that any fully mass — in the sense of atomized and alienated — society has ever existed,⁵ I believe that at any point in time, in any social system, some elements may be characterized as "masses."
ref: 1970, James Wilson White, The Sōkagakkai and Mass Society, page 3:
text: Undoubtedly this is the case; at least it is "masser" than in Pinchot's time.
ref: 1974, Edward Abraham Cohn, The Political Economy of Environmental Enhancement, page 91:
text: But it also highlights the changes that have taken place in gay and AIDS activism, and the way that a formerly mass movement has been recast.
ref: 1999 December, Sara Miles, “Rebel with a Cause”, in Out, page 132:
text: The director didn't make the images up; they're there, but in putting that one slice of gay life into the massest of mass media — the amoral promiscuity, the drug and alcohol abuse, the stereotyped flamboyance and campiness, the bitchy queeniness and flimsy values — something very dangerous happens […]
ref: 2000 November 21, Howie Klein, “Queer as role models”, in The Advocate, number 825, page 9:
text: […] if only because it promises the ‘massest’ of mass markets.
ref: 2001, Brian Moeran, Asian Media Productions, page 13:
text: Finally, in the past century, secular culture itself has undergone a transition from predominantly folk styles to an overwhelmingly mass culture, […].
ref: 2004, John R. Hall, Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History, page 79:
text: As a right, we come to expect it, and that happens through the mass media, the massest of which, by far, is television.
ref: 2007, Thomas Peele, Queer popular culture: literature, media, film, and television, page 11:
text: The writing has been on the wall that Americans’ support for mass deportation was subject to all kinds of caveats and provisos.
ref: 2025 July 13, Aaron Blake, “Trump’s mass deportation is backfiring”, in CNN:
glosses: Involving a mass of people; of, for, or by the masses.
Derived terms: mass burial
mass communication
mass culture
mass destruction
mass difference
mass extinction
mass funeral
mass grave
mass haul diagram
mass hysteria
mass market
mass media
mass medium
mass murder
mass murderer
mass-produce
mass production
mass report
mass shooter
mass shooting
mass start
mass starvation
mass storage
mass surveillance
mass transit
mass transportation
mass vaccination centre
weapon of mass disruption