Immense

How to spell immense

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce immense

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does immense mean?

1. adjectiveExtremely large in size, degree, or extent.

Immense in a sentence

• The project required an immense amount of planning and patience.

• From the summit they looked out over an immense valley.

Where does immense come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Immense comes from the Latin immensus, meaning 'unmeasured' or 'boundless'. It was formed from the negative prefix in-, here softened to im- before the m, attached to mensus, the past participle of metiri, which meant 'to measure'. So the literal sense was something that could not be measured because it was simply too vast. English took the word in during the 1400s, by way of Old French immense, keeping the meaning of overwhelming size or extent. The same metiri root sits behind familiar words like 'measure', 'dimension', and 'immeasurable', which is a helpful reminder that immense carries that buried idea of measuring within it, and explains why it begins with the double consonant of im- meeting mens.

How the word is built

• im- (not)
• mens- (from metiri: to measure)
• -e (adjective ending)