hoi polloi
n.
The common people; the masses.
[Greek, the many : hoi, nominative pl. of ho]
Usage Note: Hoi polloi is a borrowing of the Greek phrase hoi polloi, consisting of hoi, meaning "the" and used before a plural, and polloi, the plural of polus, "many." In Greek hoi polloi had a special sense, "the greater number, the people, the commonalty, the masses." This phrase has generally expressed this meaning in English since its first recorded instance, in an 1837 work by James Fenimore Cooper. Hoi polloi is sometimes incorrectly used to mean "the elite," possibly because it is reminiscent of high and mighty or because it sounds like hoity-toity.·Since the Greek phrase includes an article, some critics have argued that the phrase the hoi polloi is redundant. But phrases borrowed from other languages are often reanalyzed in English as single words. For example, a number of Arabic noun phrases were borrowed into English as simple nouns. The Arabic element al- means "the," and appears in English nouns such as alcohol and alchemy. Thus, since no one would consider a phrase such as "the alcohol" to be redundant, criticizing the hoi polloi on similar grounds seems pedantic.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following citations for "hoi polloi":
1668 - John Dryden, "Essay of dramatic poesy": If by the people you understand the multitude, the hoi polloi, 'tis no matter what they think; they are sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong: their judgement is a mere lottery.
c1821-2 BYRON in Lett. (1830) I. 633 [We] put on masques, and went on the stage with the hoi polloi.
1837 J. F. COOPER Europe II. 94 After which the hoi polloi are enrolled as they can find interest.
"It is interesting to note that when hoi polloi was used by writers who had actually been educated in Greek, it was invariably preceded by the. Perhaps writers such as Dryden and Byron understood that English and Greek are two different languages, and that, whatever its literal meaning in Greek, hoi does not mean "the" in English. There is, in fact, no such independent word as hoi in English — there is
only the term hoi polloi, which functions not as two words but as one, the sense of which is basically "commoners" or "rabble." In idiomatic English, it is no more redundant to say "the hoi polloi" than it is to say "the rabble," and most writers who use the term continue to precede it with *the*...
Hoi polloi without the is certainly standard, but it someimes has an unidiomatic ring to it (Bernstein 1977 describes it as "clumsy"). The decision you have to make as
an intelligent writer, therefore, is whether you are more for etymology than for idiom. We recomend that you favor idiom, but if etymology has won you over, keep in mind that simply omitting *the* is not always enough."
- Merriam) Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1989), usage note
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