It's the Word of the Day podcast for February 1st.

Today's word is gargantuan, spelled G-A-R-G-A-N-T-U-A-N. Gargantuan is an adjective.

It describes something that is very large in size or amount.

Something gargantuan is, in other words, gigantic. Here's the word used. In a sentence from

Nanocosmos, Journeys in Electron Space, by Michael Benson. By the late 1870s, he was asked to take part in the gargantuan task of evaluating

and cataloging the results of the five-year Challenger expedition, an ambitious British global

research voyage, the first ever dedicated purely to science. Hickle's contribution to the final 50-volume report of the voyage of HMS Challenger

took a decade to complete and span three volumes, 2,750 pages, and 130 plates.

Gargantua is the name of a giant king in Francois-Rablais' 16th century satiric novel, Gargantua is the name of a giant king in Francois Rablis's 16th century satiric novel, Gargantua,

the second part of a five-volume series about the giant and his son Pantagruel.

All of the details of Gargantua's life befit a giant.

He rides a colossal mare, whose tail switches so violently

that it fells the entire forest of Orleans. He has an enormous appetite, such that in one

incident he inadvertently swallows five pilgrims while eating a salad. The scale of everything

connected with Gargantua led to the adjective gargantuan,

which since Shakespeare's time has been used for anything of tremendous size or volume.

With your word of the day, I'm Peter Salkalowski.

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