It's the Word of the Day podcast for February 1st.
Today's word is gargantuan, spelled G-A-R-G-A-N-T-U-A-N.
Gargantuan is an adjective.
It describes something that is very large in size or amount,
something gargantuan is, in other words, gigantic.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Nano Cosmos, Journeys in Electron Space, by Michael Benson.
By the late 1870s,
he was asked to take part in the gargantuan task of evaluating and cataloging the results of the five-year Challenger Expedition,
an ambitious British global research voyage, the first ever dedicated purely to science.
Heykel's contribution to the final...
50-volume report of the voyage of HMS Challenger,
took a decade to complete and span three volumes, 2,750 pages, and 130 plates.
Gargantua is the name of a giant king in François Rabelet's 16th century satiric novel, Gargantua,
the second part of a five-volume series about the giant and his son, Pantagruel.
All of the details of Gargantua's life befit a giant.
He rides a colossal mare whose tail switches so violently that it fells the entire forest of Orleans.
He has an enormous appetite such that in one incident he inadvertently swallows five pilgrims
while eating a salad.
The scale of everything connected with gargantua led to the adjective gargantuan, which,
since Shakespeare's time, has been used for anything of tremendous size or volume.