I said “multiple” in front of my 4 year old and he asked what it meant. I explained, “it can mean many, several, a lot, bunches” etc.
After explaining to him the meaning I realized— why do we have different words that practically mean the same thing?
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A point that I’m not sure has been raised yet is that a given language will have different varieties and registers that are used by different groups of people and in different contexts. For example, you might have a pair of synonyms of which one is used overwhelmingly by younger people and the other overwhelmingly by older people. There may be many native speakers of the language who are only familiar with one of these words.
It is often claimed that English has a much larger vocabulary than other languages. To the extent that this is true (it’s quite difficult to quantify the total number of words in a language, or even to define what counts as part of the language), it’s because English is a widely spoken language in many different parts of the world and so has many regional varieties, some of which are quite sharply distinct from each other.
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