untold
- adjective
- /ʌnˈtoʊld/
- The disaster caused untold suffering for the victims and their families.
- untold misery
- untold damage
- untold numbers
And it's so convincing, and yet it's causing untold suffering.
- And it's so convincing, and yet it's causing untold suffering.
- Like that earthquake hit in Lisbon, you know, the centre of, of, of the church at that time, causing untold devastation.
- We've been blessed with untold riches, particularly in the mimetic realm, from male homosexuals.
- Like, you have people who worked in the Bush administration that literally have untold amounts of blood on their hands criticizing Donald Trump.
Examples
-
It gave him untold wealth and fame and allowed him to live the life most artists could only dream of.
-
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
-
I want to scale and touch just an untold number of lives.
-
And this is sort of an untold story.
-
But what I'm interested in are the untold stories.
-
The first electronic mail message was sent in 1972, and volume has increased untold times since then.
Academic text (1997) -
At the center of that struggle is an untold legal history of local government reform during Reconstruction.
Academic text (2017) -
There will be violence that will cause untold harm to the parish and to the cause of religion.
Academic text (1998) -
In the absence of organized religion and grand causes, your new belief system will bring you untold power.
-
Africa, land of great beauty and untold riches.
Synonyms
Very large in size, amount, or effect
Very large in size or amount
There are so many that you cannot say how many
Without limits or end
Very large in size, amount, or degree
Very large and without any end
Very many, too many to count
Having no limit in size or amount
Very large in number that seems to have no limit
So large or great you cannot say how big
Too great to measure or count
So many that you cannot say how many
Not limited in amount or size
So great that you cannot measure its value
So many that you cannot count them
Very large in size or number with no clear limit
So many that you cannot count them
So many that you cannot count them
Too many to count
So many that you cannot count them
Antonyms
How Numerous
Surface Forms
Morphology
untold = told (semi-transparent) = un + told
Formed by the productive prefix 'un-' plus 'told', but the sense 'incalculable' is an idiomatic extension from 'not told' (i.e., too many to be told) and may not be directly inferable by all learners.
Etymology
Untold comes from un- meaning 'not' and told from the verb 'tell', so it originally meant 'not told'. A helpful way to remember it is to imagine things so large, terrible, or private that people do not speak about them, and that's why untold now means 'too many to count' or 'very great'.