Word
Of
The
Day
galore
galore \guh-LOR\
adjective
Galore is an informal adjective that describes something as being in large numbers or amounts. It is always used postpositively, that is, after a noun.
// The store promises bargains
galore on Black Friday.
See the entry >
Examples:
“The rest of the home is filled with what Josh calls ‘love stuff,’ like an entire wall of family pictures, his mother’s recipe box, random heirlooms, and artwork
galore, including his grandfather’s acid etching prints and three-dimensional pieces made by his mother … who worked in wood and papier-mâché.” — Meg McConahey,
The Mercury News (San Jose, California), 1 July 2026
Did you know?
Galore means “in large numbers or amounts,” making it a synonym of useful words like
abundant and
plentiful. But its charm lies not in its meaning but in its sound and syntax.
Galore doesn’t sound like familiar Germanic or Latinate words, and for good reason—it’s one of a small number of Irish borrowings, coming from
go leor, meaning “enough.” It also takes an odd position in phrases: it’s used postpositively, which means that it follows the word or words it modifies. First defined in one our dictionaries way back in 1864, the word was for many years obscure and a bit of a conundrum. Limited evidence of the word in use, along with its unusual syntax, led to some editorial back-and-forth about whether
galore was an adjective or adverb; one can see how in a phrase like “someone who has money galore”
galore might have been interpreted as modifying the verb
have rather than the noun
money. But by the seventh edition of our
Collegiate dictionary, published in 1963, enough evidence had accumulated to confidently declare
galore an adjective. If you’re curious about the Great Galore Grammar Debate,
this article has information galore.