Meaning
A huge, unstoppable force or enterprise that sweeps aside whatever blocks it, whether a campaign, a movement, or a machine. Neutral-to-negative in tone, stressing relentless momentum rather than malice. In British English it is also a casual word for a very large lorry. The sense has travelled far from the sacred Indian festival image that produced the word. A strong, broadly neutral noun that often sounds slightly negative, since it implies that anything in the way will be flattened. Regional use: General English (from Hindi and Sanskrit).
Origin
From Sanskrit Jagannatha, 'lord of the world' (jagat 'world' + natha 'lord'), a title of Vishnu/Krishna worshipped at the Jagannath Temple in Puri, Odisha; Merriam-Webster gives the immediate source as Hindi Jagannath. The temple's annual Rath Yatra hauls monumental chariots bearing the deity's image through the streets, and once rolling they were famously hard to stop. The earliest European account, by the Franciscan friar Odoric of Pordenone in the early 1300s, claimed devotees cast themselves under the wheels, a tale amplified by the Travels of John Mandeville; historians widely regard the ritual-suicide story as exaggerated, with any deaths likelier accidents of crowd pressure. English writers used the anglicised name for the chariot itself from the 1600s, and the figurative sense of an unstoppable, crushing force took hold in the mid-19th century: Mary Shelley applied it to a plague (The Last Man, 1826), Dickens to a ruined man (Martin Chuzzlewit, 1844), and Stevenson to Mr Hyde (1886). Merriam-Webster dates first known use to 1841.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- jaggernauth (historical spelling)
- juggernaught (common misspelling)
- juggernauth (historical spelling)
Usage Examples
- The regulatory lawsuit did nothing to slow the e-commerce juggernaut, which posted record sales again this quarter.
- In the final kilometre she turned on the pace and rolled through the field like a juggernaut.
- Critics warned that the reorganisation had become a bureaucratic juggernaut, crushing smaller departmental projects along the way.