Ginormous

I just love words and language. Mostly etymologies, slang, and idioms. How great is "snug as a bug in a rug"?

Anyway, my new favorite word is ginormous. At first I thought it was a recent word, but if you Google it you find that it has been around since mid-century, and is even in the OED. They record the first use as in 1948.

It is interesting how new words are made. Who would have thought that gigantic and enormous (not to mention huge, colossal, humongous, immense, massive, jumbo, and mammoth) were not enough to describe all the variations of super large, and that we needed ginormous to fill a gap in the language.

I think ginormous has the implication of humorously large, while enormous means out of the ordinary large, and gigantic means giant like. so, there are nuances in the meanings.

I did once see the word written as gynormous. I think it was just a misspelling, but it is fun to think of what gynormous could mean...... a very large woman, or something bursting with womanlyness, like a Georgia O'Keefe painting. Or even a womanly norm, as in gyn-normous.