Gargantua
Americannoun
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an amiable giant and king, noted for his enormous capacity for food and drink, in Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel.
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(italics) a satirical novel (1534) by Rabelais.
noun
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Example Sentences
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In 1995, Federated, the department store chain with an appetite like Gargantua, had already taken over Macy’s.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 14, 2021
At one point, Gargantua rinses his hands in wine, picks his teeth with a pig’s trotter, spreads a green cloth over the table and embarks on an epic spree of card games.
From Washington Post ● Feb. 7, 2019
For the Russian avant-garde, the rectilinearity of modernism—the cube, plane, column, grid—was as much born from the book as it was the industrial Gargantua of the new machine age.
From Slate ● Nov. 15, 2012
Surely Don Quixote or Moby Dick or Gargantua and Pantagruel would all be classed as postmodern novels, but they were written in the 17th, 19th and 16th centuries respectively – so what’s going on there?
From Salon ● Aug. 20, 2012
In Brittany it is traceable in the legend of Gargantua; in Germany there are several variations; and in Greece it finds its counterpart in the legend of Saturn or Cronus.
From Storyology Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore by Taylor, Benjamin
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.