Giant

How to spell giant

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce giant

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does giant mean?

1. nounA being or thing of enormous size, or a person of great importance in a field.
2. adjectiveExtremely large in size, amount, or degree.

Giant in a sentence

• noun

  The old folktale describes a giant guarding the mountain pass.

• adjective

  A giant oak tree shaded the entire back garden.

• noun

  The company grew into a retail giant within a decade.

• adjective

  The warehouse stored a giant supply of bottled water.

Where does giant come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word traces back to the Greek gigas, the name for the Gigantes, the enormous earth-born beings of Greek myth who battled the gods. Latin took this in as gigas and gigantem, and from there it passed into Old French as geant, which is the form that entered English in the 1200s. The modern spelling kept the silent g at the start and added the final t that French had developed, even though we no longer pronounce a hard g sound. Over time the strictly mythological sense softened into the everyday meaning of anything unusually large, and the word also began to work as an adjective. The same Greek root survives in the scientific term 'gigantic' and in the prefix 'giga-' used for billions in computing.

How the word is built

• giant (from Latin gigas: a giant of myth)
• -t (English spelling from Old French geant)