Meaning
Enormous, tremendous in size, volume, or degree; gigantic. Often used with humorous hyperbole, as of an appetite, a task, or a bill, the word keeps a faint comic echo of its source, a gluttonous giant, while applying to anything vast rather than only food-related things. Often humorous hyperbole; somewhat more elevated and comic than plain 'enormous'. Regional use: General English (from Rabelais' French fiction; adopted into English).
Origin
The word grew out of the giant Gargantua in Francois Rabelais' comic pentalogy: Pantagruel appeared around 1532 and Gargantua, telling the father giant's story, in 1534. Rabelais did not invent the giant from nothing, since he drew on popular French folk tales of Gargantua, but his books made the name proverbial for size and appetite. English writers were using gargantuan as an adjective for anything huge by the 1590s, in Shakespeare's lifetime. The giant's name is traditionally connected to Spanish and Portuguese garganta, 'gullet, throat', fitting a character defined by swallowing, though that derivation is plausible rather than proven.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- Gargantua (the giant's name)
- gargantuanly
- Pantagruelic
- Rabelaisian
Usage Examples
- The report ran to a gargantuan four hundred pages, most of them appendices.
- They finished the gargantuan breakfast and still hiked ten miles by noon.
- Rebuilding the bridge became a gargantuan engineering project involving three firms.