Passel

 WORD OF THE DAY

passel / noun / pa-səl 

Definition
: a large number or amount

Examples
King Tut was buried with a passel of the seeds, to spice up the afterlife.
— Taras Grescoe, Smithsonian Magazine, 23 Oct. 2021

Wednesday’s gala concert featured a passel of beginnings, and Beethoven’s da-da-da-DUH was only the last of them.
— Justin Davidson, Vulture, 8 Oct. 2021

Did you know
The loss of the sound of "r" after a vowel and before another consonant in the middle of a word is common in spoken English.
This linguistic idiosyncrasy has given our language a few new words, such as cuss from curse, bust from burst, and our featured word passel from parcel.
The spelling passel originated in the 15th century, but the word's use as a collective noun for an indefinite number is a 19th-century Americanism.
It was common primarily in local-color writing before getting a boost in the 1940s, when it began appearing in popular weekly magazines such as Time, Newsweek, and Saturday Review.