What Does crowd Mean
The first thing we are going to do, before entering fully into the meaning of the term crowd, is to 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 that it is the result of the sum of the following lexical components:
-The word “multus”, which is synonymous with "a lot of".
-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 greeted by a crowd of fans at the airport” , “A crowd came out to protest after the government announcement” , “A crowd was expected, but finally only a hundred people attended the festival” .
There is no specific number beyond which a set of people can be considered to constitute a crowd. In general, 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 bedroom are a crowd in that context.
The notion of multitude 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 the 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, to cite one case, 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 crowd: "My girlfriend has a multitude of shoes in her bedroom" , "A multitude of lobsters surprised the inhabitants of the place" , "You cannot take a multitude of books with you on the trip: choose two or three and put them in your bag ” .
Based on the above, we can underline that among the words that can function as synonyms for a multitude, some stand out such as crowd, agglomeration, people, mob, mob, abundance, infinity, quantity, endless, innumerable ...
On the contrary, among its antonyms we come across terms such as hardship or scarcity, for example.
In the same way, we can indicate that there are many works that use the term in question in their titles. A good example of this is the book "The errant crowd", which is written by the Colombian author Laura Restrepo (1950).
It was published in 2003 and tells a plot that takes as a setting a hostel for pilgrims. There they intertwine their lives a foreigner, who works for a body that defends human rights; a woman disappeared in the environment of a war and a man who is in love with that war and who has not hesitated to look for her.
Another example is the book "Crowd: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire", which was published in 2005 and is written by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.