# giant

Pronunciation: say "JY-uhnt" /ˈd͡ʒaɪ.ənt/

## Adjective

1. Extremely large in size, far exceeding what is usual or expected.
   - Simple: Extremely large in size, much bigger than usual.
   - _A giant oak shaded the entire courtyard from the afternoon sun._
   - _The festival ended with a giant fireworks display over the harbor._

## Noun

2. A legendary being of human form but enormous size and strength, found in folklore, fairy tales, and myths such as the Greek Gigantes and the Norse jötnar.
   - Simple: In stories and myths, a creature like a person but huge and very strong.
   - _The young knight set out to slay the giant terrorizing the village._
   - _Old legends warned travelers of the giants who guarded the mountain passes._
3. A very large and powerful organization or company.
   - Simple: A very big and powerful company or group of people.
   - _The merger created a banking giant with branches across three continents._
   - _Regulators worried that the industry giants were squeezing out smaller rivals._
4. An unusually tall or large species of a particular animal or plant.
   - Simple: A kind of animal or plant that grows much bigger than the usual ones.
   - _Among the pines and firs of the Sierra Nevada, the sequoia stands out as a giant._
   - _Among bamboos, several tropical giants reach heights of thirty meters._
5. A person of unusually great height and bodily size.
   - Simple: A person who is much taller and bigger than most people.
   - _The new center is a giant who towers over the rest of the squad._
   - _Two giants in heavy coats blocked the narrow entrance to the club._
6. A person of extraordinary physical strength or intellectual power.
   - Simple: A person with amazing strength or great mental power.
   - _She became a giant in the field of genetics within a single decade._
   - _The conference brought together the giants of contemporary philosophy._
7. A star considerably more luminous than a main-sequence star of the same temperature, such as a red giant or a blue giant.
   - Simple: A very big, bright star that shines much more strongly than an ordinary star of the same temperature.
   - _Astronomers classified the star as a giant from its brightness and spectrum._
   - _Aging stars expand into red giants as their cores run low on hydrogen._

## Other meanings

- (noun) A gymnastics maneuver in which a gymnast swings through a full circle, usually with the body extended.
- (noun) In Ethernet networking, a frame that exceeds the maximum permitted frame size, traditionally 1,518 bytes for an untagged frame.

## Origin

This word came through Middle English geaunt from Old French geant, from Vulgar Latin *gagās and Latin gigās, ultimately from Ancient Greek γίγας (gígas, "giant"). It is related to giga- and replaced the native Old English word ent.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/giant (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).