humongous
Americanadjective
adjective
Usage
What does humongous mean? Humongous is an informal way of saying extraordinarily large or huge. Some things are more than huge—they’re humongous.A similarly informal synonym is ginormous. Other synonyms include gigantic, enormous, gargantuan, colossal, and mammoth.The word is most often applied to physical objects whose size makes you marvel with awe. Blue whales are humongous. Skyscrapers are humongous. The Grand Canyon is humongous.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 humongous. Like any adjective used to describe something’s size, humongous is often used in a way that’s relative to the situation. Many things described as humongous are objectively huge, like redwood trees or the planet Jupiter. But something might be considered humongous only in comparison to other similar things. For example, an unusually large grapefruit might be described as humongous even though it’s not all that big in general—it’s simply humongous compared to normal-sized grapefruits.Humongous is sometimes casually used to mean extremely important or significant—much like the figurative use of big and huge, as in This is a humongous win for the franchise. Sometimes, this is negative, as in humongous error, humongous failure, or humongous misunderstanding. Because it’s so informal, it’s unlikely to be used in very serious situations.Example: You don’t realize how humongous the sun is until you see an image of a planet next to it for scale.
Etymology
Origin of humongous
First recorded in 1965–70; expressive coinage, perhaps reflecting huge and monstrous with stress pattern of tremendous
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.
In private conversations, researchers whispered about which lab might be the first to build AI “superintelligence” that is smarter than mere humans—and whether they were in the middle of one humongous bubble.
“Yet humongous numbers pepper the news, and as citizens, we are asked to make sense of the material.”
From Los Angeles Times
Some hang out under humongous oil palm trees.
From Literature
For Bruckner, rising melodic scales, humongous fanfares with trumpets and horns and Wagner tubas galore and repeated patterns over and over by an unstoppable orchestra serve as injections of musical endorphins.
From Los Angeles Times
And then when you want to sell it, you’ve got to pay commissions and the humongous transfer taxes.
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.
