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Gargantua is the name of a giant king in François Rabelais's 16th-century satiric novel Gargantua, the second part of a five-volume series about the giant and his son Pantagruel. All of the details of Gargantua's life befit a giant. He rides a colossal mare whose tail switches so violently that it fells the entire forest of Orleans. He has an enormous appetite, such that in one incident he inadvertently swallows five pilgrims while eating a salad. The scale of everything connected with Gargantua led to the adjective gargantuan, which since William Shakespeare's time has been used for anything of tremendous size or volume.
Synonyms
- astronomical
- astronomic
- Brobdingnagian
- bumper
- colossal
- cosmic
- cosmical
- cyclopean
- elephantine
- enormous
- galactic
- giant
- gigantesque
- gigantic
- grand
- herculean
- heroic
- heroical
- Himalayan
- huge
- humongous
- humungous
- immense
- jumbo
- king-size
- king-sized
- leviathan
- mammoth
- massive
- mega
- mighty
- monster
- monstrous
- monumental
- mountainous
- oceanic
- pharaonic
- planetary
- prodigious
- super
- super-duper
- supersize
- supersized
- titanic
- tremendous
- vast
- vasty
- walloping
- whacking
- whopping
Examples of gargantuan in a Sentence
Mithil Aggarwal, NBC News, 16 Apr. 2024
What was once a gargantuan oil refining complex that looked like a city itself is now just empty land undergoing cleanup, with mounds of dug up soil, muddy pools of water and jagged concrete pieces strewn across the property.
—Rachel Ramirez, CNN, 14 Apr. 2024
Beyond that tower, 43 more now stretch as far as the eye can see east and west along 95th Street — erected to bring power to the gargantuan $4 billion Panasonic electric vehicle battery plant under construction south of Kansas Highway 10, and set to open in 2025.
—Eric Adler, Kansas City Star, 4 Apr. 2024
Duval County Public Schools has 54 media specialists who were given the gargantuan task of reviewing more than 1.6 million titles to determine which now broke the law.
—Lori Rozsa, Washington Post, 10 Feb. 2024
The sound on this gargantuan triple-album is dense and booming, making for a particularly intense—almost claustrophobic—experience.
—Ernesto Lechner, SPIN, 11 Apr. 2024
The Powerball jackpot for Monday's drawing reset to $20 million after someone in Portland, Oregon, won the gargantuan $1.326 billion jackpot on Saturday − the fourth biggest prize in the game's history.
—USA TODAY, 9 Apr. 2024
Its collection includes such items as his Moloch floor lamp — an ordinary swing-arm desk lamp blown up to gargantuan proportions.
—Fred A. Bernstein, New York Times, 4 Apr. 2024
Craig’s gargantuan tusks swooped low, and his hide seemed to glow with a rich reddish dust that set him apart from the other males trooping nearby.
—Paul Brady, Travel + Leisure, 23 Mar. 2024
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'gargantuan.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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Cite this Entry
“Gargantuan.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gargantuan. Accessed 28 Apr. 2024.
Copy CitationKids Definition
gargantuan
adjective
from Gargantua, a giant with an enormous appetite in books by the French author François Rabelais
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