vast

Pluralvasts

1. 1
   adjective

   Exceptionally great, particularly in extent but also in size, amount, degree, or intensity.

   The reforms affected a vast number of small businesses.

   Telescopes reveal the vast scale of the observable universe.

   Similarhuge, enormous, immense, massive, tremendous

   Oppositetiny, small, minuscule, negligible

2. 2
   adjective

   Very large or wide, whether in actual space or in a figurative sense.

   The ranch spread across a vast tract of open grassland.

   There is a vast gulf between his promises and his actions.

   Similarhuge, immense, enormous, extensive, expansive

   Oppositetiny, small, narrow, limited

   Note

   The everyday sense works as easily on a difference or a gulf as on a desert. Its most fixed phrase is the vast majority, as in Southwest Airlines' 2022 statement that its scheduling system works "the vast majority of the time." It compares in two ways: vaster and vastest sit alongside more vast and most vast, and both pairs are correct.

3. 3
   nounliterary

   An immense, seemingly boundless expanse of space.

   The astronaut drifted alone through the vast of space.

   His verses summon the silent vast of the northern tundra.

   Similarexpanse, vastness, immensity, void

   Note

   A poet's noun made from the adjective. It always takes an article: a vast, the vast. In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's friends "shook hands, as over a vast," and the image is of distance more than bulk. In ordinary prose it reads as deliberately elevated, and an expanse or the void is the safer choice there. Its plural is vasts.

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