多

Ideogrammic compound (會意 /会意) – two pieces of meat (肉). In the bronze script, 肉 was corrupted into 夕 due to visual similarity, making 多 into a duplication of 夕. The form with 夕 was inherited in later scripts.

Chi (2010) suggests that meat is scarce in ancient times, so two pieces of meat is a lot, citing a passage from Mencius:

:

Chang Ping-chuan suggests that it is the duplicative nature of the character that gives the meaning of "many", just like in 林 (“forest”), from 木 (“tree; wood”).

Etymology unclear. Schuessler (2007) suggests that it is in the same word family as 諸 (OC *tjaː, *tja, “many; all”) and 庶 (OC *hljaɡs, “many”).

Hill (2014, 2019) compares it to Tibetan ཆེ (che, “big”), མཐེ་བོ (mthe bo, “thumb”), Burmese တယ် (tai, “very”). STEDT derives the latter two from Proto-Sino-Tibetan *ta-j (“big”), whose Chinese comparandum is 大 (OC *daːds, “large”) instead; Baxter (1992) has also compared it to this etymon.

Baxter and Sagart (1998) propose that there may be a prefix *t- in this word that gives a mass noun reading, which may nullify the connection to Proto-Sino-Tibetan *ta-j (“big”). However, Baxter and Sagart (2014) may have withdrawn from this theory since they no longer indicate the *t as a prefix.

Also compare Proto-Tai *ʰlaːjᴬ (“many, much”), whence Thai หลาย (lǎai, “many”) and Zhuang lai (“many”), and Proto-Hlai *hləːy (“many”) (Gong Qunhu, 2002; Schuessler, 2007; Baxter and Sagart, 2014). Schuessler (2007) considers the Chinese word to be from Kra-Dai, but others suggest that the direction of borrowing may have been the other way (Li, 1977; Baxter and Sagart, 1998; Norquest, 2007).