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.
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
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
Even Microsoft's own gargantuan Visual Studio development program is in the store now.
—PCMAG, 22 Mar. 2024
But the bike’s range promises to be just as gargantuan.
—Bryan Hood, Robb Report, 1 Apr. 2024
The Chesapeake 1000, a gargantuan crane that can lift 1,000 tons at a time, has been deployed to the site and is ready for use, said Pinchasin, but has so far been thwarted by the depth of the water around areas of the wreckage.
—Jacob Bogage, Washington Post, 31 Mar. 2024
The new deportation cases in Miami’s immigration system raises questions about how judges and court staff will handle the gargantuan volume of cases.
—Syra Ortiz Blanes, Miami Herald, 29 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.
Articles Related to gargantuan
Dictionary Entries Near gargantuan
Cite this Entry
“Gargantuan.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gargantuan. Accessed 16 Apr. 2024.
Copy CitationKids Definition
gargantuan
adjective
from Gargantua, a giant with an enormous appetite in books by the French author François Rabelais
Share