Definition:
: 1. an inhabitant of Brobdingnag, an imaginary land of giants in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels 2: someone or something marked by tremendous size
Example:
"Just unpacked placemats I ordered from John Lewis. They are 39 cm across. Brobdingnagian. Feel I have entered some strange world" — Diana Henry (@DianaHenryFood), on Twitter, 18 Feb. 2015
About the Word:
Brobdingnagian comes to our language from Gulliver's Travels, in which book there was a land called Brobdingnag, where everything was large. Gulliver's Travels was first published in 1726, and the word was quickly adopted by other writers (we see it being used within two years). There are a good number of adjectives in English with similar meaning that have been formed in this fashion: leviathan (after the fabled sea monster), gargantuan (after the hero of Rabelais's character, Gargantua), titanic (after the forebears of the Greek gods), and polyphemian (after the greedy cyclops who devoured several of Ulysses's men in the Odyssey).
