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gargantuan

/ɡɑɹˈɡæn.t͡ʃu.ən/adjective

gargantuan is an adjective meaning “Huge; immense; tremendous” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled G-A-R-G-A-N-T-U-A-N and has 4 syllables, and it appears about once in every 2 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does gargantuan mean?

adjective

  1. 1

    Huge; immense; tremendous.

  2. 2

    obsoleteOf the giant Gargantua or his appetite.

adjective

as Gargantuan
  1. 1

    Alternative letter-case form of gargantuan.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce gargantuan?

  • UK /ɡɑːˈɡæn.t͡ʃu.ən/
  • US /ɡɑɹˈɡæn.t͡ʃu.ən/
  • Australia /ɡaːˈɡæn.t͡ʃʉ.ən/

Gargantuan has 4 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-gargantuan.oga, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of gargantuan

  • more gargantuan comparative
  • most gargantuan superlative

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is gargantuan?

Gargantuan appears about once in every 2 million words in written English, the 43,663rd most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Gargantuan in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense huge:

LanguageWords
Frenchgargantuesque
Germangigantisch
Spanishagigantado, descomunal

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does gargantuan come from?

From French Gargantua, a giant with a very large appetite in Rabelais's The Inestimable Life of Gargantua. Rabelais derived Gargantua from the Portuguese and Spanish garganta (“throat”).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).