masses:
a great many people of the lower classes of a society;
all the common people of an area, society or country,
the masses
e.g.
Winston Churchill was very popular with the masses.
Why is it that a few politicians are able to deceive the masses who are more educated, intelligent and hard working but not the masses exploiting the politicians?
The people in the show business, film stars and TV artists, are more popular with the masses than the scientists and educators who sacrifice their entire lives making new things and giving useful ideas that help people live a better life.
For a news interview in which we find this word referring to all the people of a country, please click here & please click here, for a political article about ‘masses’ in the USA, please click here, for a political news article about a leader and his masses, please click here.
a mass in progress in a Catholic church
Note 1: In British English, ‘masses’ is also used to refer to a large number or quantity of something, e.g. ‘Masses of food are wasted at weddings.’ & ‘huge land masses broke off the slopes during heavy rains’; and also to refer to the Catholic Christian Church prayers, e.g. ‘More masses are conducted in the Catholic churches when some important clergy passes away.’ For an item of news that shows us how this word is used to refer to prayers, please click here.
Note 2: ‘Mass’ without the end ‘es’, as a noun, means ‘the matter/weight of a particular thing’, and as an adjective it is often used in phrases such as ‘mass media’, ‘mass communication’, ‘mass production’, ‘mass protest’, ‘mass hysteria’, etc. to mean ‘to all or most of the people in general rather than to each individual person’. For a news article that shows us how we come across this word in this sense in our daily browsing, please click here.
Note 2: ‘Mass’ without the end ‘es’, as a noun, means ‘the matter/weight of a particular thing’, and as an adjective it is often used in phrases such as ‘mass media’, ‘mass communication’, ‘mass production’, ‘mass protest’, ‘mass hysteria’, etc. to mean ‘to all or most of the people in general rather than to each individual person’. For a news article that shows us how we come across this word in this sense in our daily browsing, please click here.
