Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Of a size, extent, or degree that elicits awe or taxes belief; immense. See Synonyms at enormous.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Like a colossus; of extraordinary size; huge; gigantic.
- Synonyms Immense, enormous, prodigious.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Of enormous size; gigantic; huge.
- adj. (Sculpture & Painting) Of a size larger than heroic. See Heroic.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. so great in size or force or extent as to elicit awe
Etymologies
- From French colossal, formed from Latin colossus, from Ancient Greek κολοσσός (kolossos, "giant statue"). (Wiktionary)
- French, from Latin colossus, colossus; see colossus. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“He uses the word colossal when something truly irks him.”
“Plus, former President Bill Clinton warning fellow Democrats against what he calls a colossal blunder.”
“At night, asleep, he lived with the gods in colossal nightmare; and awake, in the day, he went around like a somnambulist, with absent stare, gazing upon the world he had just discovered.”
“Though anti-drug organizations like the Partnership gladly re-enforce all of these supposed stoner traits, the media has piled on with constant jokey references to pot-heads adding "dude" to every sentence (ok, maybe that one's true, dude) with their groggy heads buried in colossal sized bags of Doritos.”
The Huffington Post: Steve Bloom: Legalization or Bust: A Brief History of Marijuana Prohibition
“I drift with the crowd out of the square into a tangle of narrow streets, where the public-houses are a-roar with drunkenness, men, women, and children mixed together in colossal debauch.”
“And so it was that the whole population of San Francisco went forth next day in colossal frolic upon the hills that overlooked the sea.”
“At night, asleep, he lived with the gods in colossal ni. htmlare; and awake, in the day, he went around like a somnambulist, with absent stare, gazing upon the world he had just discovered.”
“Dwarfing the more famous Three Gorges Dams in cost and scale, this hydroengineering colossal is China's solution to a predicted water-parched future, one that surely would derail the most dynamic economy in the world if it came to pass.”
“Although they use enough power to require daily recharges (both use memory cards, which seem to drain colossal amounts of power), I had never had a problem with one of they dying on me in the midst of the day.”
“Their nuclear power, though colossal, is so colossal as to be unusable except for keeping each other terrified.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘colossal’.
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GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4087 more...
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Test Prep or Just for fun
Building a list for standardized test prep or just for learning some new words! Please add any words that you feel are important for the SAT/GRE/GMAT etc...
throng, morass, parley, facile, kismet, strife, jetsam, carrion, annex, harbinger, vestige, surreptitious and 575 more...
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my fab list
blowsabella, aperçu, froideur, salubrious, abject, gallipot, mumchance, wainscot, virago, macerate, lascivious, clandestine and 181 more...
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The weird, the wonderful and the plai...
Loved for their ingenuity, an exact description, or simply for the pure joy of it.
acidulous, aprosdoketon, higgledy-piggledy, lexicographical, ninja, audacious, somnabulist, shivaree, amorphous, quidnunc, glib, melancholy and 353 more...
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Adjectives
sagacious, average, angry, mad, crazy, giant, ugly, pretty, happy, sad, lonely, solitary and 119 more...
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BIG Words
Awesome words that just mean "BIG"
gargantuan, massive, behemoth, colossal, mammoth, monumental, leviathan, immense, enormous, elephantine, astronomical, whopping and 18 more...
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Words for Big
Words, terms and phrases that denote big, bigness, or making something bigger.
enlarge, giant, giantess, biggify, enormous, enhance, augment, whopper, swell, swollen, inflated, gigantic and 54 more...
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the brothers
factotem, extrapolation, antinomy, antenome, pusillanimous, capons, caftan, pejorative, cropper, cowl, perfidious, fichu and 138 more...
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Shadowkeir's list
This list, the one shown below this very message, is a collection of words that you cannot begin to fathom how much I adore. The list will also feature atithesis and contrasting words such as the t...
wishful, anticlimactic, forte, monchromatic, septic, wonderous, isoclinal, deformed, disintergrate, favourite, laughable, awe-inspiring and 250 more...
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words unknown
repeat!!!
laissez faire, propensity, punitive, explicit, whim, extenuating, distort, gross, grossly, hearsay, dispel, apprehensive and 113 more...
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Need to Know!
elicit, educe, refute, cogency, churlish, martinet, veritable, polyglot, dissemble, histrionics, prevarication, verbiage and 166 more...
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minneapolitan's Words
hissyfit, fussbudget, aghast, lament, trichinellosis, tranche, decadent, aspersion, pejorative, aniline, galoshes, accede and 200 more...
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The Most Beautiful Words in the Engli...
mellifluous, obscure, star-crossed, undulating, solstice, messiah, audacious, solace, twilight, wanderlust, lovelorn, byzantine and 219 more...
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katiad's Words
exquisite, obnoxious, noxious, extravaganza, whirlwind, whirling, wild, spinster, existential, chaos, zephyr, blasphemy and 310 more...
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The Last Werewolf
This novel by Glen Duncan, aside from being a ripping yarn and beautifully written, is just littered with words that I had to look up and discover that often his use of the word not only fitted per...
gurns, bok, chimney breast, dichotomy, Platonic form, filthy, Platonic Form, mathematics, BAM, skirls, clarity, blundering and 298 more...
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nail01
sentimental, eloquent, inevitable, pretentious, verbose, aptly, stoically, grandiloquent, valedictory, assiduous, exorbitant, wreaked and 154 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for colossal.

Louises Iowa. Nebraska. Wyoming. Utah. Those unritzy states of seared openess, giant arenas for the colossal geometry of light and weather. Here the main performance is still planetary, a lumbering introspective working-out of masses and pressures yielding huge accidents of beauty: thunderheads like floating anvils; a sudden blizzard. Geological time, it dawns on you, is still going on. From "The Last Werewolf" by Glen Duncan. Mar 12, 2012