TONS

Pronunciation (US):

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does tons mean? 

• TONS (noun)
  The noun TONS has 1 sense:

1. a large number or amount

  Familiarity information: TONS used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• TONS (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A large number or amount

Classified under:

Nouns denoting quantities and units of measure

Synonyms:

dozens; gobs; heaps; lashings; loads; lots; oodles; piles; rafts; scads; scores; slews; stacks; tons; wads

Context example:

she amassed stacks of newspapers

Hypernyms ("tons" is a kind of...):

large indefinite amount; large indefinite quantity (an indefinite quantity that is above the average in size or magnitude)

 Context examples 

Had the emissions met standards, the vehicles would have emitted closer to 8.6 million tons of NOx.

(Diesel Pollutes More Than Lab Tests Detect, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

A gigaton is one billion tons.

(New Study Brings Antarctic Ice Loss Into Sharper Focus, NASA)

This led to an increase, by 1.2 tons, of the carbon stored in both vegetation and soil in those areas since 1986.

(Fire control harms biodiversity in Brazilian savannah, SciDev.Net)

As a comparison, a typical terrestrial forest stores about 30,000 metric tons per square kilometer, mostly in the form of wood.

(Sharks, the seagrass protectors, National Science Foundation)

The researchers found that in 2000, just over 162 million tons of pesticides were sold in Brazil.

(Pesticides blamed for rise in colon cancer deaths, SciDev.Net)

Our experience is that for such large objects typically between 20 and 40 percent of the original mass, of 8.5 tons, will survive re-entry and then could be found on the ground, theoretically, he said.

(Scientists Track Chinese Space Station as It Falls to Earth, VOA)

There’s tons of money being laid against your man.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

U.S. residents generate 1.6 million tons of household hazardous waste per year.

(Hazardous Waste, Environmental Protection Agency)

It's big enough to have contained 14 billion tons of ice, and most of that ice melted over the last three years.

(Huge Cavity in Antarctic Glacier Signals Rapid Decay, NASA)

In the 20th century, Greenland has lost around 9,000 billion tons of ice in total, causing about 25 millimeters (1 inch) of sea level rise, according to National Geographic.

(Study: Greenland's Ice Melting Faster than Previously Thought, VOA)