Confessions of the Linguistic Spy

Humongous

This is the word I’ve heard on numerous occasions from an acquaintance of mine – you know how sometimes people have ‘signature’ words of their own.

Again I had to turn to the dictionary to make sure I got the meaning right and found out that ‘humongous‘ means something ‘extremely large and impressive’, and the word is quite informal.

Here are some more examples of its usage:

– Building a humongous airport from scratch there, with a view to it replacing Heathrow in the future makes sense to me (The Guardian).

– But what was startling was the humongous crowd which had gathered to catch a glimpse of the talk show host (Examiner.com).

– You have to start thinking about the Web as this humongous event stream. The Web is a set of ongoing conversations that weave together into this new kind of omnipresent social fabric  (The Guardian).

– If you don’t know about Live Earth already, you certainly will by the time the humongous 24-hour charity concert gets underway on July 7  (The Guardian).