colossus
Pluralcolossi, colossuses
- 1Any creature or object that is gigantic in size.
The factory floor was crowded with steel colossi that pressed car bodies from sheet metal.
In the final level, the hero must climb a lumbering colossus and find its weak point.
Note
Stretched from statues to anything enormous, the word fits machines as readily as creatures. Isaac Asimov's Foundation (1951) calls the Empire's great machines, which its people no longer understand, its colossi, and the giant beings of the game Shadow of the Colossus share the name.
- 2A statue of gigantic size; the name was given especially to famous statues of the ancient world, such as the Colossus of Rhodes and the Colossus of Nero in Rome.
The emperor ordered a bronze colossus of himself to tower over the entrance to his palace.
Two seated colossi of the pharaoh still guard the ruined temple.
Note
Greek kolossós already meant a large statue, and the Greeks used it above all for the giant figure at Rhodes; before that its trail goes cold in an unknown language older than Greek. English took the word through Latin and kept the Latin plural, colossi, beside the plainer colossuses. Capitalized, as in the Colossus of Rhodes, it names one particular statue.
- 3Someone or something held in the very highest admiration and respect.
Beethoven remains a colossus of Western music, studied by generations of young composers.
Critics count both novelists among the colossi of twentieth-century fiction.
Note
The praise most naturally comes in the frame a colossus of a field: The Economist in 2014 called Isaac Newton the colossus of science. It borrows the image of the giant statue towering over everything around it, so it suits figures whose standing seems lasting; for someone merely popular or successful, it overshoots.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of colossus apart? Answer 4 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
From Latin colossus, from Ancient Greek κολοσσός (kolossós, "large statue", especially the Colossus of Rhodes), which comes from an unknown Pre-Greek source and was once wrongly associated with κολοφών.