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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
- 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
Word History
Gargantua
1596, in the meaning defined above
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Cite this Entry
“Gargantuan.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gargantuan. Accessed 21 Dec. 2024.
Kids Definition
gargantuan
adjectivefrom Gargantua, a giant with an enormous appetite in books by the French author François Rabelais
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