different between gargantuan vs elephantine

English

Etymology

From French Gargantua, a giant with a very large appetite in Rabelais's The Inestimable Life of Gargantua. Rabelais derived Gargantua from the Portuguese and Spanish garganta (“throat”).

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /?????æn.t?u.?n/

Adjective

gargantuan (comparative more gargantuan, superlative most gargantuan)

1. Huge; immense; tremendous.

   Synonyms: colossal, enormous, giant, huge, humongous, immense; see also Thesaurus:gigantic
2. (obsolete) Of the giant Gargantua or his appetite.

Derived terms

• gargantuanism
• gargantuanly
• gargantuanness

Translations

Further reading

• “gargantuan”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–present.

References

English

Pronunciation

• (US) IPA^(key): /?l.?.?fæn.tin/, /?l.?.?fæn.t?n/, /?l.?.?fæn.ta?n/

Adjective

elephantine (comparative more elephantine, superlative most elephantine)

1. Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of elephants.
   • 1989, H. T. Willetts (translator), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (author), August 1914, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ?ISBN, page 179:

     This last summer Hanecki had captured Lenin’s imagination with his plans to found a trading company of his own in Europe, or take a partnership in some existing firm and make guaranteed monthly remittances to the Party out of his profits. This was not a Russian pipe dream: every move had been worked out with impressive precision. Kuba hadn’t thought of it himself, it was the brainchild of the elephantine genius Parvus, who had been writing to him from Constantinople. Parvus, once as poor as any other Social Democrat, had gone to Turkey to organize strikes, and now wrote frankly that he had all the money he needed (if rumor was right, he was fabulously wealthy) and that the time had come for the Party too to get rich.

2. Very large.

Synonyms

• (of or relating to elephants): elephantic, elephantlike
• (very large): See also Thesaurus:gigantic

Derived terms

• elephantine epoch
• elephantine leprosy
• elephantine tortoise

Translations

Latin

Adjective

elephantine

1. vocative masculine singular of elephantinus