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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.
Examples of gargantuan in a Sentence
Ryan Craig, Forbes.com, 30 May 2025
Weighing in at a gargantuan 30 tracks, Music debuted at the top spot on the Billboard 200 with the biggest streaming week for a rap album since Drake’s For All the Dogs in 2023.
—Hazlitt, 28 May 2025
The rocket is complex and gargantuan, wider and longer than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, and after nearly two years of steady progress since its first test flight in 2023, this has been a year of setbacks for Starship.
—ArsTechnica, 28 May 2025
SpaceX's gargantuan Starship rocket is due to once again get off the ground from Texas more than two months since its last launch.
—Eric Lagatta, USA Today, 25 May 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Gargantuan.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gargantuan. Accessed 4 Jun. 2025.
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gargantuan
adjective
from Gargantua, a giant with an enormous appetite in books by the French author François Rabelais
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