Brobdingnagians

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. People of extraordinarily great stature, like the giants imagined in Jonathan Swift's satirical tale of Brobdingnag
2. Beings of gigantic size, a term drawn from the land of oversized inhabitants in Swift's Gulliver's Travels
3. Huge individuals of towering height, named after the enormous race encountered in the fictional kingdom of Brobdingnag

Etymology: Brobdingnagians are the giant inhabitants of Brobdingnag, the fictional land that Jonathan Swift created for "Gulliver's Travels." In the book, Gulliver washes up on this coast and finds himself among people roughly sixty feet tall, where everyday objects like a wasp or a farmhand's hay rake become alarming to him. The name itself is pure invention. Brobdingnag is a made-up place, and the "-ian" ending is a common suffix that turns a place name into a word for its people, the same pattern seen in "Victorian" or "Elizabethan." So the plural describes the imagined race of giants in Swift's satire, and the word has since been used more loosely for anything oversized.

Synonyms: giants

Antonyms: dwarfs, midgets