gargantuan
Americanadjective
adjective
Usage
What does gargantuan mean? Gargantuan means extraordinarily large or huge. Some things are more than huge—they’re gargantuan.The word is commonly applied to physical objects whose size makes you marvel with awe. Blue whales are gargantuan. Skyscrapers are gargantuan. The Grand Canyon is gargantuan.But it can also be applied to intangible things, as in With all the champagne and caviar that we ordered, the bill for dinner is going to be gargantuan. It is especially associated with things involving food, such as a gargantuan appetite or a gargantuan meal.Similar adjectives are gigantic, giant, colossal, and mammoth. A more formal synonym is massive. More informal synonyms are humongous and ginormous.Something might be considered gargantuan only in comparison to other similar things. For example, an unusually large grapefruit might be described as gargantuan even though it’s not all that big in general—it’s simply gargantuan compared to normal-sized grapefruits. Still, it’s usually used to describe things that are objectively huge, like redwood trees or the planet Jupiter.Gargantuan is sometimes casually used to mean extremely important or significant—much like the figurative use of big and huge. Sometimes, this is negative, as in gargantuan error or gargantuan failure.Example: You don’t realize how gargantuan the sun is until you see an image of a planet next to it for scale.
Etymology
Origin of gargantuan
First recorded in 1585–95; Gargantu(a) + -an
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
It will also bring changes to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — the three gargantuan federal programs that make up the social safety net on which tens of millions of people depend.
From MarketWatch
The Collegiate—an abridged, more manageable version of the company’s gargantuan International edition—was introduced in 1898 and had been revised roughly every decade thereafter.
They are particularly wary about OpenAI’s ability to meet gargantuan future commitments.
But in order to even transport astronauts to the moon, SpaceX must develop technology that will refuel Starship while in Earth orbit, given how much fuel the gargantuan craft consumes during its launch.
From Los Angeles Times
But imperiled lions, Cummings said, need their habitats stitched together in the form of wildlife crossings — such as the gargantuan one being built over the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills.
From Los Angeles Times
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.
