enormous
- 1Extremely large; far greater in size or extent than is usual.
Rebuilding the bridge required an enormous amount of money.
Researchers found an enormous crater hidden beneath the ice sheet.
Similarhuge, vast, immense, massive, gigantic
Oppositetiny, small, minute, negligible
Note
Only the size meaning is still in everyday use, and it has outlived its older siblings. What is "out of the norm" in magnitude is enormous. It pairs naturally with scale, amount and extent: The Economist in 2013 described floods that "wrought disaster on an enormous scale". It compares with more and most rather than -er and -est: more enormous, most enormous.
- 2Deviating from what is normal or customary; unusual or extraordinary.
Note
Here the Latin is still audible: ēnormis, from ex- "out of" and norma "rule", so what was enormous stood outside the regular pattern. An enormous hereditary disease was an irregular one, not necessarily a vast one. The sense is obsolete, and a modern reader will hear the "extremely large" meaning instead, so in current writing choose unusual or irregular.
- 3Exceedingly wicked; atrocious or outrageous in nature.
how apt wee are to receive all impressions, and chiefly the most wicked and enormous.
1603, Michel de Montaigne, The EssayesNote
Breaking the rule has become breaking the moral law, a meaning that grew from the "out of the rule" sense. It often travels in a fixed pair, wicked and enormous. The pair appears in John Florio's 1603 translation of Montaigne's Essayes, and still in James Pillsbury Lane's Historical Sketches of 1872. When the two words stand together in older texts, take enormous as "atrocious", not "huge".
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Origin
From Latin ēnormis, an assimilated form of ex- ("out of") plus norma ("rule, norm") with the ending -ous, so literally something out of the ordinary rule.