Word of the Day:
colossus
What It Means
A statue of gigantic size. The name was especially applied to certain famous statues in antiquity, as the Colossus of Nero in Rome and the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Any creature or thing of gigantic size.
Somebody or something very greatly admired and respected.
Colossus in Context
“The truth is that [Isaac] Newton was very much a product of his time. The colossus of science was not the first king of reason, [John Maynard] Keynes wrote after reading Newton’s unpublished manuscripts. Instead “he was the last of the magicians”.”
Did You Know?
From Latin colossus, from Ancient Greek κολοσσός (kolossós, “large statue, especially the colossus of Rhodes”), from an unknown Pre-Greek etymon (and erroneously associated with κολοφών).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: colossus (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “colossus.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/colossus. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
