Meaning
Enormous in size, force, or ambition - the adjective for anything on the scale of the old gods it names. A titanic effort is one worthy of the beings who fought the ten-year war for the cosmos; a titanic row is simply huge. Grand but rarely solemn now - newspaper scale rather than epic; a titan alone still names a person of enormous standing in a field. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
The Titans were the gods before the gods: Hesiod's Theogony makes them the twelve children of Sky and Earth, the former gods who ruled until Zeus and the Olympians overthrew them in the ten-year Titanomachy and cast them into Tartarus. Hesiod offered a folk etymology from titaino, to strain, and tisis, vengeance - a name given in reproach - and Jane Ellen Harrison derived it from titan os, white earth, making them white clay men; the Near Eastern parallels run deep, the Hurrian-Hittite Song of Kumarbi telling a castration story five centuries older. English formed the adjective from their name for the colossal - and the liner Titanic of 1912 fixed it in modern memory with grim fitness, a vessel named for the overthrown giants. Wiktionary's senses run from of the Titans through great size, force, or strength to contests of equally powerful parties, with a separate chemistry sense for titanium compounds.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a titan
- a titanic struggle
- titanic efforts
Usage Examples
- The family firm survived the recession through titanic overtime rather than any cleverness.
- Their titanic struggle over the will outlasted three firms of solicitors and both executors.
- A titanic row about car parking had, by midnight, redrawn the department's entire org chart.