It's the Word of the Day podcast for December 13th.

Today's word is immense, spelled I-M-M-M-E-N-S-E.

Immense is an adjective. Something described as immense is very great in size, degree, or amount.

Here's the word used in a sentence from Conday-Nast Traveler.

At night, the winds howls and whistles provide the soundtrack to the immense vista.

Just how big is something if it's immense, huge, colossal, humongous,

ginormous, or merely enormous? Immense is often used as a synonym of all of the above,

and as such can simply function as yet another way for English speakers to say really, really, really big.

But immense is also used in a sense which goes beyond merely, really, really, really big

to describe something that is so great in size or degree that it transcends ordinary means of

measurement. This sense harks back to the original sense of the word immense,

for something which is so tremendously big, such as, say, the universe, that it has not been or cannot

be measured. This sense reflects the words roots in the Latin imensus, from in, meaning un,

and mensus, the past participle of materi, meaning to measure.

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

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