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:
While the quartet — the first metal band to perform at Sphere — tore through the instrumental deep cut “The Call of Ktulu,” that drippy leviathan swatted at life-sized fighter jets on the screen.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 4, 2026
Once the leviathan of profit for companies like Johnson & Johnson and Boston Scientific, pelvic mesh was now the white whale of liability for mass tort plaintiffs’ attorneys.
From Slate ● Jan. 13, 2026
As Ms. Aikin shows, in many ways the modern governmental leviathan would not be possible without the manifold collections and reference services of the Library of Congress.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 25, 2025
But — and this is one leviathan of a “but” — something else is starting to emerge in the polling.
From Seattle Times ● Mar. 9, 2024
It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another.
From "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury
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
Leviathan and other companies are trying to find ways of doing this work much more cleanly and safely.
From BBC ● Oct. 5, 2023
The Leviathan natural gas platform in the Mediterranean Sea off Israel’s coast.
From New York Times ● Jul. 27, 2023
A striking example of this is to be found in Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-pump.
From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton
Dinios Kol of the Khanum Empire’s justice department is summoned to investigate the murder of a treasury officer in Yarrowdale, where the dead bodies of leviathans are processed into the components of powerful magic.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 12, 2025
In 2020, a team of marine biologists and computer scientists joined forces to analyze the click-clacking songs of sperm whales, the gray, block-shaped leviathans that swim in most of the world’s oceans.
From New York Times ● May 7, 2024
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
Though these leviathans are often loners, they can live for more than 200 years, making their longevity more than double that of more social species such as sperm and humpback whales.
From Scientific American ● Jan. 31, 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.
