When we want to describe something truly huge, English gives us some wonderfully dramatic options. These are the words we reach for when ‘big’ just isn’t big enough.

A behemoth is a huge or monstrous creature, or something enormous, such as a big and powerful organisation, first mentioned in the Bible. This is what Job says of the Behemoth in the Old Testament:

“He carries his tail like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are like cables.

His bones are like tubes of bronze; his frame is like iron rods”

The word behemoth is generally thought to refer to the hippopotamus. It is derived from the Hebrew behemah meaning ‘beast’.

A leviathan is a huge sea creature or monster of the deep and is mentioned five times in the Bible. It is referred to as “that crooked serpent” and “the dragon that is in the sea”.

It is supposed that the creature was either a crocodile or a whale, although it is also linked with the Devil. It comes from the Hebrew liwyatan.

A mammoth was a huge extinct hairy elephant. It has come to mean huge and is derived from the Russian mamot. Their twisted tusks help to distinguish them from living elephants, and it’s believed these could reach lengths of around 5 metres.

A colossus is a person or thing of enormous size, importance or ability (much like our Colossus crossword), or a statue larger than life, like the Colossus of Rhodes, the huge bronze statue of the sun god Helios, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It stood beside the harbour entrance at Rhodes in Greece in ancient times.

Whether we’re talking about a mammoth undertaking or a titanic appetite, these grand-scale words give us a way to acknowledge that some things are simply more than ordinary.

Happy Puzzling!