# juggernaut

Pronunciation: US say "JUG-er-nawt" /ˈd͡ʒʌɡ.ɚ.nɔt/; UK/AUS say "JUG-uh-nawt" /ˈd͡ʒʌɡ.ə.nɔːt/

## Noun

1. A force or object, literal or figurative, regarded as unstoppable and bound to crush everything in its path.
   - Simple: A thing or force that seems impossible to stop and crushes everything in its way.
   - _By midseason the defending champions had become a juggernaut, flattening opponents by twenty points a night._
   - _The juggernaut of suburban development rolled on, swallowing farmland mile by mile._
2. A large, cumbersome truck, especially an articulated one such as a tractor-trailer. *(British, Ireland)*
   - Simple: A very big, awkward truck, especially the kind where a front section pulls a trailer.
   - _A forty-tonne juggernaut jackknifed on the motorway, closing two lanes for most of the morning._
   - _Residents want the council to ban juggernauts from the village's narrow lanes before one of them hits a pedestrian._
3. An organization or system that encourages harmful loyalty or for whose sake people are sacrificed with little regard for their welfare.
   - Simple: An organization or system that people serve with harmful loyalty, or that carelessly uses up people's lives.
   - _Generations of mill children were sacrificed to the juggernaut of the factory system._
   - _For twenty years he served the party juggernaut with a loyalty that cost him his marriage and his health._

## Other meanings

- (proper noun) The Hindu deity Krishna, regarded as an avatar of the god Vishnu.

## Origin

Borrowed in the 17th century by British English speakers in India from Hindustani jagannāth or Odia jagannātha, from Sanskrit jagannātha ("Lord of the Universe"), a title for Krishna, an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu. The sense comes from the Rath Yatra chariot procession at Puri, where hundreds of devotees pull a huge wagon carrying the idol of Jagannath with ropes, and it builds up so much momentum that it becomes unstoppable. The -er- spelling reflects how non-rhotic British speakers heard the Hindi schwa sound, and the ending was influenced by the suffix -naut ("traveller, voyager").

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