Word of the Day: Gargantuan - This word has a delightfully literary origin. It comes from Gargantua, the giant king in François Rabelais' 16th-century satirical novel Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534). Gargantua was famous for his enormous appetite and physical size — at birth, he supposedly cried so loudly it was heard across the land. His name likely derives from the Spanish/Portuguese word garganta, meaning throat, which also gives us the English word gargle. By the late 1500s, "gargantuan" had entered English as a general adjective for anything of extraordinary magnitude. Gargantuan means extremely large or enormous. Bigger than massive.