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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.
Examples of gargantuan in a Sentence
Merle Ginsberg, HollywoodReporter, 4 Sep. 2025
Avraham and his wife, Susan Tahari, commissioned local architect Robert Zampolin to design the gargantuan 21,000-square-foot mansion.
—Demetrius Simms, Robb Report, 4 Sep. 2025
There’s Peter Crouch, a gargantuan 6-foot-7 forward, who racked up 108goals in the Premier League in England.
—Michael Lewis, Forbes.com, 30 Aug. 2025
While these gargantuan commercial-grade wind turbines can supply an impressive amount of power to a large collection of homes, German company SkyWind has taken a different, and user-friendly, approach to harnessing wind energy.
—New Atlas, 28 Aug. 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Gargantuan.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gargantuan. Accessed 10 Sep. 2025.
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gargantuan
adjective
from Gargantua, a giant with an enormous appetite in books by the French author François Rabelais
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