Using, speaking, or written in several languages. It works two ways, and students should feel the difference. About a person: someone who can speak several languages — 'She is multilingual.' About a thing: made in several languages — a multilingual website, a multilingual sign at the airport, multilingual instructions in a medicine box. In careful use, multilingual means more than two. For exactly two, people say bilingual, and bilingual is by far the more common word in everyday talk. If a friend says 'my kid is bilingual', they mean two. Multilingual sounds slightly grander and more official; you see it a lot in school policy, government documents, and job advertisements. There is also a looser, warmer use: people describe a city, a family, or a classroom as multilingual when several languages are simply in the air, even if no single person there speaks them all. Taipei's MRT announcements are multilingual in exactly this sense. One more thing worth knowing: 'multilingual' says nothing about how well. A person who speaks four languages badly is still, technically, multilingual — which is why job ads usually add a level, like 'multilingual (fluent in English and Japanese)'.