Brobdingnagian
adjective

- extremely large

- marked by tremendous size

- gigantic; of extraordinary size; huge

Cambridge Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, Oxford English Dictionary

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WORD ORIGIN

Brobdingnagian comes directly from Brobdingnag, the fictional land of giants in Jonathan Swift's 1726 satirical novel Gulliver's Travels. In Part II of the book, Lemuel Gulliver finds himself shipwrecked in Brobdingnag, where the inhabitants are twelve times taller than normal humans—making ordinary objects appear enormous to the tiny visitor.

Swift likely invented the name "Brobdingnag" to sound suitably strange and unwieldy, possibly influenced by words suggesting largeness or clumsiness. The suffix "-ian" was added to create the adjective form, following the pattern of other place-based adjectives (like "Lilliputian" from Lilliput, the land of tiny people also in Gulliver's Travels).

The word entered English usage within decades of the novel's publication and has remained in literary and formal use ever since, typically reserved for things of truly exceptional size rather than merely large objects. Unlike "gigantic" or "enormous," which apply to physical dimensions alone, "Brobdingnagian" often carries connotations of the impractical, the overwhelming, or the absurd—echoing Swift's satirical intent.

The term gained renewed popularity in the 20th and 21st centuries as technological and architectural ambitions produced structures and projects of genuinely unprecedented scale.

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STARS vs. SAND: THE FINAL COUNT



In 1980, when Carl Sagan stated the number of stars in the universe exceeded all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world, he was using a poetic tool to help us grasp an unimaginable number. Decades later, thanks to the Hubble and James Webb telescopes, we now know that the sky above is far more crowded than even Sagan imagined.

If each galaxy holds an average of 100 billion stars, the total count reaches a Brobdingnagian septillion (10 to the power of 24). This means that for every single grain of sand on every beach on Earth, there are at least 10,000 stars in the heavens. We often think of our world as a vast place, but this comparison shows that even our entire planet is just a tiny speck in a much larger manufacturing process.

Realizing that the stars “win” this comparison so easily rewrites our sense of place. The night sky stops being a decorative backdrop and becomes a real landscape, packed with suns and worlds in numbers that make even all Earth’s beaches feel provincial by comparison. Once that sinks in, it becomes harder to see our own lives and even our species as the centre of everything—and easier to recognise them instead as brief, bright, and miraculous episodes.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

a whale of a, BROBDINGNAGIAN, colossal, cosmic, elephantine, enormous, gargantuan, giant, gigantic, herculean, huge, hulking, humongous, immense, jumbo, king-sized, leviathan, mammoth, massive, monster, monstrous, monumental, mountainous, of epic proportions, on a grand scale, outsized, oversized, prodigious, staggering, stupendous, supersized, thumping, titanic, towering, tremendous, vast, walloping, whopping

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SMUGGLE
 OWAD into a conversation today, say something like:

“The size of the universe is truly BROBDINGNAGIAN!” 

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P L E A S E   S U P P O R T   O W A D

On evenings and weekends, I research and write your daily OWAD newsletter together with Helga—my lovely wife and coaching partner—and our eagle-eyed daughter, Jennifer.

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Thanks so much,

Paul, Helga, & Jenny Smith

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