Leviathan

How to spell leviathan

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce leviathan

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does leviathan mean?

1. nounA huge and fearsome creature of the sea, especially the monstrous beast of biblical and mythological tradition.
2. nounAnything of enormous size, power, or complexity, such as a vast organisation or machine.

Leviathan in a sentence

• The old sailors spoke of a leviathan that could swallow a ship whole.

• The merger created a corporate leviathan that dwarfed every rival in the sector.

• The novel opens with a leviathan rising from the black depths of the ocean.

• Managing the budget of such a bureaucratic leviathan took an entire department.

Where does leviathan come from?

Language of origin: Hebrew

The word comes from the Hebrew livyathan, a name for a great twisting sea creature mentioned several times in the Hebrew Bible, where it appears as a primeval monster of the deep. The Hebrew form is thought to derive from a root meaning 'to coil' or 'to wreathe', evoking a serpentine body, which suits the writhing dragon-like beast described in the Book of Job. It passed into English through the Latin of the Vulgate Bible, where Saint Jerome kept the name largely intact, and so it surfaces in early English scripture around the 1300s. Its broader modern sense, anything vast and overwhelming in size or power, was cemented in 1651 when Thomas Hobbes titled his great work of political philosophy 'Leviathan', using the monster as an image of the all-powerful state. The unusual spelling, with that quiet 'th' and the unstressed vowels around the stressed 'vi', is a direct fossil of its Hebrew and Latin journey rather than anything native to English.

How the word is built

• from Hebrew livyathan (a great sea creature), adopted whole; no separable English prefix or suffix