Word of the Day
: February 1, 2026gargantuan
playWhat It Means
Gargantuan describes something that is very large in size or amount; something gargantuan is, in other words, gigantic.
// Bigfoot is said to be a creature of gargantuan proportions.
gargantuan in Context
“By the late 1870s, he was asked to take part in the gargantuan task of evaluating and cataloguing the results of the five-year Challenger expedition—an ambitious British global research voyage, the first ever dedicated purely to science. [Ernst] Haeckel’s contribution to the final 50-volume Report of the Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger took a decade to complete and spanned three volumes, 2,750 pages, and 130 plates.” — Michael Benson, Nanocosmos: Journeys in Electron Space, 2025
Did You Know?
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.
Test Your Vocabulary with M-W Quizzes
Test Your Vocabulary
Fill in the blanks to complete an adjective meaning “extraordinary in bulk, quantity, or degree”: p _ _ d _ g _ _ u s.
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