Word.ws English Dictionary

gentle giant

gentle giant noun: a person or animal of a great size or strength, yet who is of a friendly nature and not aggressive or threatening.

Noun

gentle giant (plural gentle giants)

  1. (idiomatic) A person or animal of a great size or strength, yet who is of a friendly nature and not aggressive or threatening.
    • […] lest he be should be brought into the like state as was the gentle giant.1807, Francisco de Moraes, Luis Hurtado, Anthony Munday, Palmerin of England [also ascribed to L. Hurtado, originally translated by A. Munday, corrected by Robert Southey], page 112

Forms of gentle giant

pluralgentle giants

Origin of gentle giant

From gentle + giant. First use appears c. 1807 in a translated work. See cite below.

Questions about gentle giant

What does gentle giant mean?
Gentle giant means a person or animal of a great size or strength, yet who is of a friendly nature and not aggressive or threatening.
What part of speech is gentle giant?
Gentle giant is a noun.
What is the plural of gentle giant?
The plural of gentle giant is gentle giants.

Words near gentle giant in the dictionary

  1. Gentle Annies
  2. gentle as a lamb
  3. gentle breeze
  4. gentle breezes
  5. gentle craft
  6. gentle giant
  7. gentle giants
  8. gentle lemur
  9. gentle lemurs
  10. gentle murder paradox
  11. gentle nor simple

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gentle giant (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “gentle giant.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gentle_giant. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.