Various means of several different kinds. Various reasons, boxes in various shapes and sizes, a drawer of various keys that no longer open anything.
It sits in front of a plural noun and does two jobs at once, saying there were several and saying they were not all the same. Various neighbours have complained means more than a couple, and more than one type of neighbour. It is a useful vague word when the details do not matter, or when you would rather not list them, which is why for various reasons is the polite way of explaining nothing. After the noun, varied is the natural choice: the reasons were varied. The family around it is vary, varied, variety and the adverb variously.
1adjectivevariousOf several different kinds.~17%
“The museum shop sells various small things that nobody needs.”
synonyms: assorted, diverse
2adjectivenumberSeveral different ones; a number of.~83%
“Various neighbours have complained about the noise from the yard.”
synonyms: several
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Various came from Middle French varieux and before that Latin varius, which meant many-coloured and speckled as well as diverse, and also changeable and fickle. The colour sense is the picture to keep: a varius thing was patchy, not one flat shade. Vary and variety grew from the same Latin word.
Latin
varius — manifold, diverse, various, parti-colored, variegated, also changing, changeable, fickle, etc.
Middle French
varieux
English, today
various
Middle French varieux, from Latin varius (“manifold, diverse, various, parti-colored, variegated, also changing, changeable, fickle, etc.”). by surface analysis, vary + -ous.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA