מָלֵא

The word "מָלֵא" (male) in Hebrew has a dual usage: its original meaning is "full, completely filled" (as in the phrase "a cup full of water") and it appears in the Bible with this meaning. However, in modern Israeli Hebrew, the word has developed an additional slang meaning - "a lot, a large amount," as in the example "a lot of people came to the party." This usage began to become popular in the 1970s, and apparently developed as a calque of the Arabic word "ملان" (malan), which literally means "full" but is also used in the sense of "a lot" in some dialects of spoken Arabic. Early documentation of the slang use of the word in Hebrew can be found in Erwin Klein's book "The Wonderful Disappearance of a Quiet Leader" from 1979, where the author puts in the mouth of a dentist the sentence "That customer had only two teeth, but a lot of money." From the Arabic word "ملان" (malan), the Hebrew slang form "מָלַאנְתַּלָּפִים" (malantalafilm) was also borrowed, which denotes a particularly large number.