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COLOSSAL
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I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
So great in size or force or extent as to elicit awe
Example:
stupendous demand
Synonyms:
colossal; prodigious; stupendous
Classified under:
Similar:
big; large (above average in size or number or quantity or magnitude or extent)
Derivation:
colossus (someone or something that is abnormally large and powerful)
Context examples:
Astronomers are not sure whether they merely grazed each other or collided head-on, but either way it triggered a powerful eruption that launched other nearby protostars and hundreds of colossal streamers of gas and dust out into interstellar space at over 150 kilometers per second.
(Dramatic Stellar Fireworks of Star Birth, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)
The group observed the colossal winds of material — or outflows — that originate near the supermassive black hole at the heart of the pair’s southern galaxy, and have found the first clear evidence that stars are being born within them.
(Stars Born in Winds from Supermassive Black Holes, ESO)
Two international teams of scientists led by Tim Miller from Dalhousie University in Canada and Yale University in the US and Iván Oteo from the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, have uncovered startlingly dense concentrations of galaxies that are poised to merge, forming the cores of what will eventually become colossal galaxy clusters.
(Ancient Galaxy Megamergers, ESO)
Astronomers are not sure whether they merely grazed each other or collided head-on, but either way it triggered a powerful eruption that launched other nearby protostars and hundreds of colossal streamers of gas and dust out into interstellar space at over 150 kilometres per second.
(ALMA Captures Dramatic Stellar Fireworks, ESO)
The whole question of the Netherland-Sumatra Company and of the colossal schemes of Baron Maupertuis are too recent in the minds of the public, and are too intimately concerned with politics and finance to be fitting subjects for this series of sketches.
(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
It was a groove that bridged the Atlantic with uneventfulness, so that the ship was not a ship in the midst of the sea, but a capacious, many-corridored hotel that moved swiftly and placidly, crushing the waves into submission with its colossal bulk until the sea was a mill-pond, monotonous with quietude.
(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)
Before the sun dipped below the black mass of Kettleness, standing boldly athwart the western sky, its downward way was marked by myriad clouds of every sunset-colour—flame, purple, pink, green, violet, and all the tints of gold; with here and there masses not large, but of seemingly absolute blackness, in all sorts of shapes, as well outlined as colossal silhouettes.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
It was the colossal bulk of them that impressed him.
(White Fang, by Jack London)
But the one thing he was not was that colossal appetite that all the mob was bent upon feeding.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
New research by University of Colorado Boulder professor Stephen Mojzsis outlines a likely cause for these mysterious features of Mars: a colossal impact with a large asteroid early in the planet's history.
(Ancient Asteroid Impact Explains Martian Geological Mysteries, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)
