Word.ws English Dictionary

sleeping giant

sleeping giant noun: someone or something with great, latent strength.

Noun

sleeping giant (plural sleeping giants)

  1. (idiomatic) Someone or something with great, latent strength.
    • There is a sleeping giant in education that is just beginning to awaken.1926 June, C.E. Mahaffey, “The Sleeping Giant in Education”, in The Educational Screen, volume 5, page 335
    • I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.1970, Tora! Tora! Tora!, spoken by Isoroku Yamamoto

Examples of sleeping giant in a sentence

  • The Council regards the Alliance as a sleeping giant.2008, BioWare, Mass Effect, Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Systems Alliance: Military Doctrine Codex entry:
  • Bruce Merrill, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University who has worked as an Arizona pollster for four decades, is skeptical that the Latino “sleeping giant” will wake anytime soon.2012 September, Tom Zoellner, “The Myth of the Latino Vote”, in The Atlantic:
  • Europe’s Sleeping Giant Awakens [title, referring to Germany]2022 March 1, Noah Barkin, “Europe’s Sleeping Giant Awakens”, in The Atlantic:

Forms of sleeping giant

pluralsleeping giants

Origin of sleeping giant

A metaphor, maybe derived from Gulliver's Travels (1726), and made popular by the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora!, see quotations.

Questions about sleeping giant

What does sleeping giant mean?
Sleeping giant means someone or something with great, latent strength.
How do you use sleeping giant in a sentence?
The Council regards the Alliance as a sleeping giant.
What part of speech is sleeping giant?
Sleeping giant is a noun.
What is the plural of sleeping giant?
The plural of sleeping giant is sleeping giants.

Words near sleeping giant in the dictionary

  1. sleeping dragon
  2. sleeping dragons
  3. sleeping draught
  4. sleeping draughts
  5. sleeping funny
  6. sleeping giant
  7. sleeping giants
  8. sleeping in
  9. sleeping in heavenly peace
  10. sleeping it out
  11. sleeping language

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sleeping 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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-sleeping giant.ogg.

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