From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englisha variety of somethinga variety of somethingVARIOUS/OF DIFFERENT KINDSa lot of things of the same type that are different from each other in some way The girls come from a variety of different backgrounds. → variety
Examples from the Corpus
a variety of something• The reef fishes display an almost endless variety of colors and patterns.• It includes searchable Olympic housing ads and event schedules, restaurant reviews, local attraction listings and a variety of news summaries.• Milosevic has not used force for a variety of reasons, but none of them neatly squares with conventional wisdom.• Children do badly at school for a variety of reasons.• For a variety of reasons, our team will not be participating.• The tragedy is now being pieced together from a variety of reports from outside the immediate impact area.• Our night school was different for them, though, and they showed us that in a variety of ways.• The college offers a wide variety of language courses.• They are made very dependent on a variety of specialists for information and advice ... and in fact so are the parents.• These could carry nuclear or conventional high explosives or a variety of runway-cratering sub-munitions.• They soon spread to a variety of habitats, but in the Palaeozoic they were conspicuously abundant in relatively shallow environments.• He held that there were a variety of different rightness-making properties. 