Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Very great in size, number, amount, or quantity.
- adj. Very great in area or extent; immense.
- adj. Very great in degree or intensity. See Synonyms at enormous.
- n. Archaic An immense space.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Wide and vacant or unoccupied; waste; desolate; lonely.
- Being of great extent or size; very spacious or large; enormous; massive; immense.
- Very great in quantity, number, or amount.
- Very great as to degree, intensity, difficulty of accomplishment, importance, etc.; mighty: used also in exaggerated colloquial speech, being much affected in the eighteenth century.
- Synonyms Spacious.
- 3 and Colossal, gigantic, prodigious, tremendous, stupendous.
- n. A boundless waste or space; immensity.
- n. A great deal; a large quantity or number.
- n. The darkness of night, in which the prospect is not bounded in by distinct objects: only in the following passage.
Wiktionary
- adj. Very large or wide (literally or figuratively).
- adj. Very great in size, amount, degree, intensity, or especially extent.
- n. poetic A vast space.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. obsolete Waste; desert; desolate; lonely.
- adj. Of great extent; very spacious or large; also, huge in bulk; immense; enormous.
- adj. Very great in numbers, quantity, or amount.
- adj. Very great in force; mighty.
- adj. Very great in importance.
- n. A waste region; boundless space; immensity.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. unusually great in size or amount or degree or especially extent or scope
Etymologies
- From Latin vastus ("void, immense"). (Wiktionary)
- Latin vāstus. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Some of the phrases they gave me, such as the phrase "vast majority" used twice were pretty vague, and because I hadn't seen the actual language, I was reporting only what I was told, but it sounded like we were headed toward fairly tight release language on the settlement.”
The Huffington Post: Mike Lux: The Great Task Force and Settlement Debate
“Minow coined the phrase "vast wasteland" in 1961, he was referring to television.”
“The English word vast is derived from the Sanskrit vas, so Vasudeva also means that vast and all-encompassing Supreme Being within whom all other beings are contained.”
“I'd like to blame the French toast, the mocha lattes, the pizza, and what I call the vast buffalo wing conspiracy.”
“He and Hillary have spent their adult lives fighting what she called the vast right wing conspiracy.”
“So it is easier to go back and look at the Hillary health care controversy, to look at her sparring with what she calls the vast right-wing conspiracy over the years.”
“Hillary has her fight with what she calls the vast right wing conspiracy.”
“Hutten had little or none of Luther's religious fervor, but he could not find colors too dark in which to picture to his countrymen the greed of the papal curia, which he described as a vast den, to which everything was dragged which could be filched from the Germans.”
“In short, of all the seventeen booksellers, only one has vouchsafed even to read my tales; and he -- a literary dabbler himself, I should judge -- has the impertinence to criticise them, proposing what he calls vast improvements, and concluding, after a general sentence of condemnation, with the definitive assurance that he will not be concerned on any terms ....”
“In short, of all the seventeen booksellers, only one has vouchsafed even to read my tales; and he -- a literary dabbler himself, I should judge -- has the impertinence to criticise them, proposing what he calls vast improvements, and concluding ... that he will not be concerned on any terms ....”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘vast’.
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Linda(G4)
Accurate, address, afford, alert, analyze, ancestor, annual, apparent, arena, arrest, ascend, assist and 126 more...
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Public List: Two by Fives
This is an experiment in public lists--something I've been thinking about for some time. The goal is to create a collection of short, powerful, evocative words.
This is an open list. A...icy, howl, hymn, thorn, fire, vile, mist, blunt, scum, dark, shot, gleam and 221 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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ficciones's list
encyclopedic
imbroglio, splendour, brilliance, labyrinth, vast, precipice, ebb and flow, tidal, crevasse, resonate, redolent, prudent and 55 more...
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Words That Can Be Typed Entirely With...
Words made of the following: qwertasdfgzxcvb. I've stood on the shoulders of giants... users mollusque and reesetee made similar lists before I even existed on Wordnik. :)
stewardesses, red tea, waves, axes, wrest, qat, waver, created, dressed, stress, crater, vexes and 50 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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Words for my English Learners
vast, superfluous, inevitable, though, pervasive, overwhelm, assume, presume, curious, eccentric, whimsical, quaint and 12 more...
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Adjectives 2
Conditions
better, alive, important, wrong, vast, tender, shy, rich, mushy, odd, helpful, gifted and 8 more...
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dharma66's list
words that pique my interest either by meaning, pronunciation, or spelling, and words that otherwise tickle my fancy!!
pique, elusive, serendipity, nefarious, redundant, pseudoscientific, obsequious, flack, quandary, impervious, perchance, translucent and 168 more...
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Vocabulary Words
words to reference while writing something
cohesive, epitome, tempered, imply, prudent, sundry, sagest, agitation, giddy, disposition, inclination, gracious and 114 more...
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spread out, spacious words of spe
words pertaining to the root spe- (hope) with some allegorical liberties.
paten, pan, pass, patent, petal, expand, repand, passacaglia, passe, paseo, paella, spawn and 150 more...
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Words from "Pearls Before Breakfast"
nondescript, shrewd, seed money, bureaucrat, indeterminate, fungible, cupidity, banal, grandeur, utilitarian, buffer, ecstatic and 123 more...
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Basic English Vocabulary
Very basic words for ESL students.
contemplate, container, consumer, consultant, consensus, conscious, conscience, connection, confusion, confront, conflict, confident and 4334 more...
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Faintheart's Words
onomatopoeia, no, terrafactive, word, faint, heart, joy, quixotic, karla, half, amp, tardis and 181 more...
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Landscape
riparian, littoral, talus, fen, ambit, savanna, remnant prairie, shortgrass prairie, tallgrass prairie, marsh, swamp, marshy and 199 more...
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my dictionary
able, abnormally, abroad, absent, abstract, acceptable, acceptance, access, accessible, accession, according to, account and 4551 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for vast.
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