slew

Slew once meant an army. The English word is widely traced to Irish slua or sluagh, "host, crowd, troop," a form alive in medieval and early modern Gaelic speech long before English turned it casual. The original image was collective and formidable. A slew was people in dangerous numbers.

Borrowing did what borrowing often does: it flattened intensity into convenience. In Scots and regional English, forms like sluagh and slew moved from the sense of a host to a large number more generally. By the nineteenth century, English could say a slew of problems, a slew of letters, a slew of anything. Soldiers vanished. Quantity remained.

There was another pressure on the word: English already had slew as a verb, from a different Germanic source meaning "turned" or "skidded," and another past tense of slay. Languages tolerate these collisions more easily than schoolbooks do. Meaning sorted itself by context. Etymology is not neat. Speech rarely is.

Today slew is brisk, colloquial, and slightly dismissive. It means abundance without precision, usually with a hint of burden or sprawl. That relaxed modern use is the ghost of an older collective force. A crowd became a shrug.