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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 of gargantuan
Examples of gargantuan in a Sentence
Natasha Dye, PEOPLE, 19 Dec. 2025
That 13-year gap between the world-building first and ocean-plumbing second films allowed film wizardry to progress, so audiences came freshly wide-eyed to James Cameron's gargantuan adventure in 2022.
—Bob Mondello, NPR, 18 Dec. 2025
The gargantuan task of taking the reins of Venezuela’s government, shifting it away from a brutal dictatorship and keeping the peace is expected to largely fall to the opposition group led by Maria Corina Machado.
—Brian Bennett, Time, 11 Dec. 2025
Space Research Organization Netherlands astrophysicist Liyi Gu, who is another author of the study, and colleagues say the process that spawned the storm is not much different from the process that causes solar flares and coronal mass ejections from our own sun — just on a gargantuan scale.
—Kiona N. Smith, Space.com, 9 Dec. 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Gargantuan.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gargantuan. Accessed 27 Dec. 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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