Irregular Etymology: Gigundous
posted 12th January 2005 in Mysteries by Jim
Here’s a word for you: Gigundous.
As in, “Look at that house on the hill. It’s gigundous!”
This is how I think it would be spelled, but to tell you the truth I’ve never seen it spelled. I don’t believe it’s a formal, Webster’s-approved word. But I hear it all the time.
Do you use this word? Where the heck does it come from? How would you spell it? And how would you define it? What would qualify as gigundous, and what wouldn’t make the cut?
Tags: bizarre
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I looked in the Merriam-Websters dictionary and the Cambridge dictionary with no success. However, on http://www.slanginsider.com, it was listed as a slang term for “huge or gigantic.” The site says it’s an adjective with origins in the U.S.
You say you’ve heard it all the time? I’ve never heard that term, and working around junior high-aged kids all day, you’d think I would have. Oh well, learn something new everyday.
The first thing that comes to mind as qualifying as ‘gigundous’ is the price of the plasma tv I have my eye on. At $6995 for a 42 in., I think that qualifies. If the price comes down to a more affordable level, could the price be considered ‘de-gigundified?’
I’ve heard “gigantic” and “ginormous” before… “Gigundous” definitely sounds like a slang mix-up.
nah, I’ve heard gigundus. Granted, not very often (it’s “uncool”)… but I’ve heard it.
As the wife of J. Matthew, I’d always thought he had made up the word “gigundous”. Imagine my surprise to learn that someone else had heard the word.
A cross between “Gigantic” and “Humongous” which obviously means something really large. This is funny because Humongous is a word derived from the combination of “Huge” and “Enormous”. It seems we English speakers feel like we need to revise our words for “Extremely Large” every so often in order to do justice to the emotion we feel when we see something just that darned BIG…
I first heard “gigundous” when my high-school girlfriend used it in 1976! I guess it’s been around longer than most people think.