meaning - Is "most" equivalent to "a majority of"?


In sentences such as the following, how is most best understood?



1) Most children do not like cauliflower.


2) Most of the balls in the bucket are red.



I suppose there are three or more possible interpretations for most in these sentences.



A) a plurality (at least one more than any other alternative)


B) a majority (more than half, even if barely more)


C) a comfortable majority (well more than half)



For sentence 1, interpretations A and B would be equivalent since there are only two alternatives.



Answer



This topic has been covered at Language Log (see here and here). In summary, people tend to use "most" to mean anything over 50%; some people feel it should only be used in sense C (a comfortable majority), but it is also used in sense A (a plurality). The context might make it clear which meaning is intended, or else it might simply be ambiguous.


Example:



The party with the most seats in the parliament gets to form the government



Here "most" means "a plurality".



Most dentists recommend Colgate toothpaste.



Here it is ambiguous about whether there is a bare majority or a comfortable majority.


From the 2nd Language Log link:



I searched on Google for the pattern "most * percent", and picked out of the first 150 hits all the examples like these:



most Pakistanis (64 percent) believe it is important to improve relations with their powerful ally Most (72.4 percent) said that they would consider dating someone of a different race. Most Americans (51.4 percent) will live in poverty at some point before age 65.



There were 72 numbers in my list, and the histogram of 69 of them looked like this: enter image description here You might believe that this is a bimodal distribution, with one mode just above 60% and another just above 80% — though if you divide things up into ten-percent bins, the stretch from 60 to 90 flattens out: enter image description here In any event, it's pretty clear that the whole range from 50.1 to 99.9 is getting some action.



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