immense

Formsimmenser, immensest

1. 1
   adjective

   Extremely large in size, extent, or scale.

   The cathedral's immense dome dominated the city skyline.

   An immense, featureless plain stretched toward the distant hills.

   Similarhuge, enormous, vast, massive, colossal

   Oppositetiny, small, minute, minuscule

   Note

   The Latin behind it is a negative: immensus, from in- "not" and mensus "measured". The immense was first the unmeasured, too large to be taken in by any rule, and it reached Middle English through Old French as immens. The same root of measuring sits inside incommensurable, and the poetic noun keeps the old idea most visibly, naming the measureless itself.

2. 2
   adjectivecolloquial

   Very great in degree or significance; major.

   Her steady support during the crisis was of immense importance.

   The treatment had an immense impact on patients' recovery times.

   Similargreat, enormous, tremendous, huge, considerable

   Oppositeslight, negligible, minor, little

   Note

   Here the bigness is figurative: the word measures degree, not bulk. Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847–48) puts it before a noun for a type of person, "immense dandies these", meaning dandies through and through, not large ones. With abstract nouns like importance or impact the intensifying sense is plain. With people it can be misread as the sense of physical size, so let context make the degree clear.

3. 3
   adjectivecolloquial

   Extremely good; excellent.

   The band's final set was immense, and the crowd went wild.

   Reviewers agreed her debut performance was immense.

   Similarsuperb, brilliant, outstanding, excellent, terrific

   Oppositepoor, awful, mediocre

4. 4
   nounliteraryuncountable

   Boundless extent or expanse; vastness conceived as a thing in itself.

   The poet wrote of a lone soul adrift in the immense.

   Beyond the harbor lights lay the immense, dark and silent.

   Similarvastness, void, infinity, expanse

   Note

   Poetry turns the adjective into a thing: James Thomson writes of convicts "lost in its Immense" (1882), capitalized almost like a place name. As a noun it needs a determiner (the immense, its immense), and it can even take a plural: New Times International (1994) speaks of "the immenses of the former USSR". Outside verse or deliberately elevated prose, immensity is the safer word.

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