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A blend of the adjectives gigantic and enormous, the colloquial adjective ginormous means: impressively or shockingly big.
—Synonym: humongous.
The adjective ginormous occurs, for example, in the following from The Boston Globe (Boston, Massachusetts, USA) of Friday 16th May 2025 [page A1, column 2]:
A graduation season flavored with trepidation
Federal actions hang over celebrations
By Brooke Hauser
Globe StaffIn 2020, COVID-19 led to the cancellation of in-person graduation ceremonies across the country. Last year, amid the Israel-Hamas war, many students disrupted the usual pomp and circumstance with chants for a “free, free Palestine” and mass walkouts.
The class of 2025 knows disappointment. It knows defiance. And now, four months into President Trump’s second term, it knows trepidation and dread.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s 2025 class president, Megha Vemuri, recently recalled the “ginormous, very powerful walkout” over the war in Gaza at the school’s 2024 commencement ceremony.
These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the adjective ginormous that I have found:
1-: From Wedding March (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1938), by the Welsh novelist Berta Ruck (1878-1978) [chapter 13, page 100]:
The voice of some very young girl, going by with three youths, all quite evidently in festive mood, shrilled out: “Oh, look! The great, big, gi-normous, black-haired, handsome Hearty with the Tarzan figure is going away already. What a shame!”
2-: From Spitfire!: The Experiences of a Fighter Pilot. By Squadron Leader B. J. Ellan (London: John Murray, 1942), by Brian John Edward Lane (1917-1942):
—From the 2011 edition by Amberley Publishing, Stroud, Gloucestershire [page unnumbered]:
How to Shoot a Line
Shooting a line doesn’t necessarily refer to shooting Huns, although sometimes it is much the same thing! By writing this book I am shooting a line, in other words, talking about myself, and what I have done. Usually, however, a line is a semi-deliberate exaggeration of a humorous nature—a tall story about yourself, if you like. If you write a book or get your name in the paper that is a ginormous line, the strange word being evolved from gigantic and enormous.
3-: From The Magic Bean, in Children’s Corner, published in the Devon & Exeter Gazette (Exeter, Devon, England) of Friday 20th November 1942 [page 3, column 4]:
Toby did have a shock. In the pit was a giant, but a giant with the jolliest face you can imagine, who, when he saw Malchick, laughed in the happiest way.
Then Malchick explained, “Billy Blundo is a friend of mine from Ginormous Land, where all the good giants live.”
4-: From An Editorial Diary, published in The Glasgow Herald (Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Scotland) of Saturday 19th April 1947 [page 4, column 2]:
The B.B.C.’s outside broadcasters have been known to be carried away and grow a shade inarticulate in the excitement of a great moment.
It may be remembered that one of them used a word that caused quite a bit of controversy when he saw the German aircraft being shot during the Battle of Britain. It was the same commentator who, from a circling Mosquito, watched Heligoland go up in smoke yesterday afternoon 1, and possibly, when he described it as the most “ginormous explosion” he had ever seen, some may have thought that the thrill was making him fumble with his words.
We fear he has not that excuse, and we must identify the word as part of the residue of the vocabulary that he picked up while he was a pilot in Coastal Command.
This telescoped combination of gigantic and enormous was an R.A.F. fancy which might have been inoffensive had it not been used by nearly everybody, in nearly every sentence, nearly every day, for nearly six months.
1 On Friday 18th April 1947, the Royal Navy detonated thousands of tonnes of surplus World-War-II ammunition on the island of Heligoland, in the North Sea.
5-: From With a Feather on My Nose (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1949), the autobiography of the U.S. actress Billie Burke (1884-1970) [chapter 13, page 174]:
Flo 2 and Charles Dillingham 3 had combined their resources to take over a new theater and to put on a ginormous production called Miss 1916, starring Marie Dressler and Leon Errol.
2 Flo refers to the U.S. theatrical producer Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. (1867-1932).
3 Charles Dillingham (1868-1934) was a U.S. theatrical producer.