leviathan
noun
Often Leviathan a sea monster.
leviathan
American
[li-vahy-uh-thuhn]
/ lɪˈvaɪ ə θən /
noun
leviathans
plural
-
Bible. Often Leviathan a sea monster.
-
any huge marine animal, as the whale.
-
anything of immense size and power, as a huge, oceangoing ship.
-
Leviathan, a philosophical work (1651) by Thomas Hobbes dealing with the political organization of society.
leviathan
British
/ lɪˈvaɪəθən /
noun
-
Bible a monstrous beast, esp a sea monster
-
any huge or powerful thing
Leviathan
Cultural
Discover More
Figuratively, a “leviathan” is any enormous beast.
Leviathan is a work on politics by the seventeenth-century English author Thomas Hobbes.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of leviathan
First recorded in 1350–1400; Middle English levyathan, from Late Latin leviathan, ultimately from Hebrew liwyāthān
Explanation
A leviathan is a giant sea creature. It can be real, like a whale, or mythical. Moby Dick is an example of a famous leviathan. The word comes from Hebrew livyathan which means a great sea serpent or sea monster. A real leviathan is the giant sea squid Architeuthis, which was photographed alive for the first time in 2005. A leviathan can also be something that is really, really big. The Titanic was a leviathan that now rests with leviathans.
Vocabulary lists containing leviathan
Lord of the Flies
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Rap Lyrics
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Refugee
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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.
See Examples For:
Here is Melville’s literary leviathan fantastically adorned with more than 270 of Kent’s black-and-white illustrations, many of them a full page in size.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 2, 2026
But — and this is one leviathan of a “but” — something else is starting to emerge in the polling.
From Seattle Times ● Mar. 9, 2024
CEO Kim Bayley said gaming "continued to show its ability to connect with people" last year, and despite the modest growth the industry "remains a leviathan".
From BBC ● Jan. 9, 2024
Plagiarism-detection leviathan Turnitin is touting its own “A.I.” solutions to confront the burgeoning issue.
From Slate ● Feb. 3, 2023
But from this vantage point she saw the wall had been crafted in the shape of a leviathan, a giant ice dragon circling the island and swallowing its own tail.
From "Six of Crows" by Leigh Bardugo
At the toe of the bluff, the geotubes stretched out like a beached Leviathan.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 8, 2026
Israel has halted production at its Karish and Leviathan fields, which will affect exports to Egypt and Jordan.
From Barron's ● Mar. 3, 2026
Like Timothée Chalamet’s dashingly coifed hero — who steers monstrous sandworms over the desert like a charioteer — Villeneuve has tamed a Leviathan.
From New York Times ● Feb. 29, 2024
Computer software being developed by Leviathan will automatically plan how to chop up a vessel as efficiently as possible.
From BBC ● Oct. 5, 2023
It is my book, not Leviathan and the Air- pump, which advocates following Gellner.
From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton
Jerry Jones and Robert Kraft are the octogenarian owners, respectively, of the Dallas Cowboys and the New England Patriots; both built leviathans for football stadiums while finding creative ways to expand the NFL brand.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 24, 2025
In his 1851 novel Moby Dick, Herman Melville describes right whales as “the most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted by man.”
From National Geographic ● Jan. 25, 2024
Pushing further back, Mota’s most recent novel, “El Foso de Mabuya,” or “Mabuya’s Tomb,” envisions leviathans destroying Christopher Columbus’s expedition before it arrives in the Americas and paints the continents as united under Indigenous peoples.
From New York Times ● Jun. 10, 2023
Hogan’s team hopes to use that breather to fill in vital details about the Mekong’s lengthy list of leviathans.
From Science Magazine ● May 30, 2023
But such leviathans appeared only late in antiquity, and were exceptional.
From "Circumference" by Nicholas Nicastro
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.
