Terrestrial planets like Venus and Earth are essentially big lumps of rock, and so might be called monolithic objects (from the Ancient Greek mono- ‘one, single’ and lithos ‘rock’). Galaxies like the Milky Way, on the other hand, are massive collections of stars, gas, dust and dark matter that coalesce together through gravitational force. Galaxies might then be termed plurilithic (using the Latin prefix pluri- ‘many’), to indicate that they are systems made up of many smaller entities.

English is without doubt a plurilithic entity, more like a galaxy than a rock. (By the way, the analogy is not a new one: in 1981 the applied linguist Larry Smith suggested that “it may be helpful to think of English as being a galaxy rather than a star”