leviathan

noun

le·​vi·​a·​than li-ˈvī-ə-thən 

1

a

often Leviathan : a sea monster defeated by Yahweh in various scriptural accounts

b

: a large sea animal

This leviathan of animals is the great Blue Whale.

—Weston LaBarre

2

Leviathan : the political state

especially : a totalitarian state having a vast bureaucracy

3

: something large or formidable

that leviathan of international corporations

leviathan adjective

Did you know?

Old Testament references to a huge sea monster, Leviathan (in Hebrew, Liwyāthān), are thought to have been inspired by an ancient myth in which the god Baal slays a multiheaded sea monster. Leviathan appears in the Book of Psalms as a sea serpent that is killed by God and then given as food to creatures in the wilderness, and it is mentioned in the Book of Job as well. After making a splash in English in the 1300s, the word Leviathan began to be used, capitalized and uncapitalized, for enormous sea creatures both imagined and real—including as a synonym of whale over 100 times in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, as in “ere the Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan.” Today, leviathan can be used for anything large and powerful, from ships to corporations.

Synonyms of leviathan

• whale
• giant
• monster
• dinosaur
• mammoth

Examples of leviathan in a Sentence

The factory is a towering leviathan in the middle of the town.

a leviathan of the seas, that cruise ship is said to be the largest passenger vessel afloat

Recent Examples on the Web

Next Friday, the country’s government will ask a Paris judge to suspend the e-tail leviathan’s French marketplace for three months, a finance ministry official said Tuesday. —Jasmin Malik Chua, Sourcing Journal, 25 Nov. 2025

Some leviathan with a glowing yellow eye from beneath the ocean's depths saved the half-orc from certain death in the middle of the sea and bestowed on him magical powers. —Nick Romano, Entertainment Weekly, 19 Nov. 2025

The industry’s first millennial mogul wants to change the DNA of Hollywood while building a new type of entertainment leviathan out of the husk of a once-legendary film and television studio. —Tatiana Siegel, Variety, 4 Nov. 2025

The English Wikipedia is now roughly 93 times bigger than Encyclopædia Britannica, the shelf-warping print leviathan that fascinated him as a child. —Big Think, 28 Oct. 2025

Word History

Etymology

Middle English, from Late Latin, from Hebrew liwyāthān

First Known Use

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

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Kids Definition

leviathan

noun

le·​vi·​a·​than li-ˈvī-ə-thən 

1

often capitalized : a sea monster often standing for evil in the Old Testament and Christian literature

2

: something very large or powerful of its kind