The Economic Times

Word of the Day: Gargantuan Meaning, pronunciation, origin, and real-world examples

Word of the Day: Gargantuan - This word has a delightfully literary origin. It comes from Gargantua, the giant king in Franois Rabelais' 16th-century satirical novel Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534). Gargantua was famous for his enormous appetite and physical size at birth, he supposedly cried so loudly it was heard across the land. His name likely derives from the Spanish/Portuguese word garganta, meaning throat, which also gives us the English word gargle. By the late 1500s, gargantuan had entered English as a general adjective for anything of extraordinary magnitude. Gargantuan means extremely large or enormous. Bigger than massive.