Talk:plenty

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• As an adjective ?? -- ALGRIF talk 11:20, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

• Yup, see google books:"were plenty and". —Ruakh_TALK 12:38, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

How do we mark this? Semantically its meaning is obvious. Grammatically, I would think that most would view it as not archaic, but wrong. DCDuring TALK 15:27, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Other "lemmings" seem to mark this as the pronoun usage. The example I put in the entry of "..six eggs are plenty.." I placed under the pronoun because that's what I find elsewhere. (I'm aware that that doesn't make it right though ;-) ). -- ALGRIF talk 17:12, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

They can't be intending to include google books:"more plenty than" as a pronoun, except for usage like Adam Smith's in Wealth of Nations. I doubt that those uses were wrong at the time (pre-20th century). DCDuring TALK 17:25, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

"Six eggs are plenty" is not in the RFV'd sense, though. Did you look at the results in the search I linked to? Most of them are using "plenty" to mean "plentiful, abundant". —Ruakh_TALK 18:07, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Century Dictionary lists plenty as both noun and adjective, with the adj being derived from the elliptical use of the noun, and carrying the meaning of "being in abundance, plentiful". It's marked as "now chiefly colloquial", I would venture (archaic, colloquial)?. Leasnam 19:17, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

• I seem to remember a Shakespeare line about "reasons being as plenty as blackberries"? Ƿidsiþ 17:50, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

• Awesome! According to Google: Henry IV, Part I, Act I, Scene IV, line 101. Sadly, Wikisource's version substitutes "plentiful". —Ruakh_TALK 01:52, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Passed because it's in Shakespeare. - -sche (discuss) 22:22, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Deletion discussion

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This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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plenty

Pronoun. There is a noun PoS section with definition and usage example I can't distinguish from those offered for the purported pronoun. DCDuring TALK 12:19, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure what to classify the first use as. It's the same conundrum we have with lots of (which just happens to be a redirect...)

For the second use, that seems to be an adjective or noun describing the subject through use of the copula equating "six eggs" to "plenty".

However, there seems to be plenty (pun intended) wrong with our coverage of the word. There are constructions like "there is plenty to go around" and "six eggs is plenty" instead of "six eggs are plenty" that our current entry does not serve to adequately describe. TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 09:12, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Also, some linguists would use the existence of lotsa as justification for an entry for lots off. Similarly, plentya is readily attestable in books and provides a justification for plenty of.

This is the kind of entry that is worth the work of consulting references, getting examples, and facing some dispute about what one does. It's also not as daunting as trying to improve or repair an entry for a common preposition or a modal or light verb. DCDuring TALK 16:44, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

• Keep: a) Plenty is a partitive pronoun, b) This an RfV issue, not an RfD one Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 23:56, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

• Delete. Plenty is either a noun or a pronoun, not both. I think it is more fitting to call it a noun. --WikiTiki89 01:51, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

• Numerous dictionaries treat it as both a noun and a pronoun. I have just added a usage note with references, but also redefined the pronoun to avoid duplicating the definitional information. - -sche (discuss) 19:07, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
• Keep pronoun. "I think six eggs should be plenty for this recipe" does not seem to be a noun use of "plenty" to me, although I am not sure it is pronoun either. The treatment of "plenty" should be compared to the treatment of "enough", since they seem to play similar grammatical roles. --- I have in part returned the definition to the pronoun: "More than enough"; this definition does not seem to belong to the noun part of speech, unlike "A more than adequate amount". --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:14, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

  Re "I think six eggs should be plenty for this recipe": I think it is an adjective or (or possibly an adverb) in this sentence. --WikiTiki89 14:11, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

• I have added the less-than-standard intensifier (adverb) sense and a determiner section with two nonstandard determiner senses (one for countable nouns, the other for uncountable). DCDuring TALK 13:13, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Kept for lack of consensus to delete. bd2412 T 16:49, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

More than sufficiently: This office is plenty big enough

Either the definition or the example must be changed because "sufficiently" and "enough" are synonymous here --Backinstadiums (talk) 11:48, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Semantically, is it plenty [big enough] or [plenty big] enough?--Backinstadiums (talk) 16:20, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

Enough behaves differently from virtually any other word. It is mentioned more than 20 times in CGEL (2002). I don't know how to help users understand its all aspects of its use using lexical entries of reasonable length for a dictionary. They may have to learn unconsciously, from reading and listening. DCDuring (talk) 16:30, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

There were plenty more who didn’t agree

What meaning is used in There were plenty more who didn’t agree? --Backinstadiums (talk) 15:11, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

Attributive use of the noun works semantically, but that seems like a strain on the fused-head role of more. The adverb definitions fit, though the wording is not perfect. DCDuring (talk) 16:33, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

Adjective: more than enough; ample

I do not now whether it's the same meaning, but in this helping is plenty for me it doesn't sound obsolete at all --Backinstadiums (talk) 16:15, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

I agree. DCDuring (talk) 16:23, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

is it a pronoun in my example, or is it obsolete attributively? --Backinstadiums (talk) 15:07, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

We use plenty as a pronoun to mean ‘enough’ or ‘more than enough’

Use plenty as a pronoun to mean ‘enough’ or ‘more than enough’ --Backinstadiums (talk) 12:27, 6 February 2021 (UTC)