huge
English
Etymology
From Middle English huge, from Old French ahuge (“high, lofty, great, large, huge”), from a hoge (“at height”), from a (“at, to”) + hoge (“a hill, height”), from Frankish *haug, *houg (“height, hill”) or Old Norse haugr (“hill”), both from Proto-Germanic *haugaz (“hill, mound”), from Proto-Indo-European *kowkós (“hill, mound”), from the root *kewk-. Akin to Old High German houg (“mound”) (compare related German Hügel (“hill”)), Old Norse haugr (“mound”), Lithuanian kaũkaras (“hill”), Old High German hōh (“high”) (whence German hoch), Old English hēah (“high”). More at high.
Pronunciation
Adjective
huge (comparative huger, superlative hugest)
- Very large.
- The castle was huge.
- 1907, Robert William Chambers, chapter VI, in The Younger Set, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, OCLC 24962326:
- “I don't mean all of your friends—only a small proportion—which, however, connects your circle with that deadly, idle, brainless bunch—the insolent chatterers at the opera, […] the chlorotic squatters on huge yachts, […] the neurotic victims of mental cirrhosis, the jewelled animals whose moral code is the code of the barnyard—!”
- 1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 1, in The China Governess:
- The huge square box, parquet-floored and high-ceilinged, had been arranged to display a suite of bedroom furniture designed and made in the halcyon days of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, […].
- 2013 July 20, “Out of the gloom”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8845:
- [Rural solar plant] schemes are of little help to industry or other heavy users of electricity. Nor is solar power yet as cheap as the grid. For all that, the rapid arrival of electric light to Indian villages is long overdue. When the national grid suffers its next huge outage, as it did in July 2012 when hundreds of millions were left in the dark, look for specks of light in the villages.
- (slang) Distinctly interesting, significant, important, likeable, well regarded.
- Our next album is going to be huge! In our league our coach is huge!
Synonyms
- (very large): colossal, elephantine, enormous, giant, gigantic, immense, prodigious, vast.
- See also Thesaurus:gigantic
Translations
very large
|
|
Further reading
- huge in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.
- huge in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.
Middle English
Etymology
From Old French ahuge, a form of ahoge.
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ˈhiu̯dʒ(ə)/
References
- “hūǧe (adj.)” in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 2018-04-03.
References
- “hūǧe (adj.)” in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 2018-04-03.
This article is issued from
Wiktionary.
The text is licensed under Creative
Commons - Attribution - Sharealike.
Additional terms may apply for the media files.