- monstrous
- monstrous 1 Monstrous, prodigious, tremendous, stupendous, monumental are comparable especially in their extended more or less hyperbolical senses in which they mean astonishingly impressive.Monstrous commonly applies to something abnormal, usually in actual or relative size, but often also in shape or character; the term frequently carries suggestions of deformity, extreme ugliness, or fabulousness{
the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams— Wilde
}{he seemed of monstrous bulk and significance—G. D. Brown
}{the monstrous way of living that mankind had made for itself out of the industrial revolution— Connolly
}Prodigious usually implies a marvelousness that exceeds belief; it sometimes applies to something entirely out of proportion to what is the previous or usual best, greatest, or largest{the prodigious demand for steel in the First World War
}{men have always reverenced prodigious inborn gifts, and always will— Eliot
}{a mind with such prodigious capacity of development as Shakespeare's— T. S. Eliot
}Tremendous may come closer to awe-inspiring or terrifying in its immensity than to gigantic or enormous, its common denotations in more literal use{must have made the animal in life look very much like a crocodile and the bite must have been tremendous— Swinton
}{how shall we compare the cramped and limited vision of the universe which spread itself to the imagination of mankind in old time with the tremendous vistas opened out to us by modern science— Inge
}{the spell and tremendous incantation of the thought of death— L. P. Smith
}{[he] too, had his appointed or acquired limits. He could never be tremendous— Montague
}Stupendous implies the power to stun or astound; it describes something that because of its size, its numbers, its complexity, or its greatness exceeds one's power to describe or explain{all are but parts of one stupendous whole, whose body Nature is, and God the soul— Pope
}{a stupendous catastrophe that occurred in the constellation Hercules 1300 years ago— Kaempffert
}Monumental in its extended sense (see also MASSIVE) applies to something as conspicuously impressive or as massively framed or constructed as such a monument as a great cathedral or an impressive memorial{his magnum opus . . . the five monumental volumes of his history of the writer in America— Trilling
}{the Mexican peon has a monumental reserve beside which the Englishman becomes an idle chatterer— Woodcock
}Analogous words: enormous, immense, *huge, vast, colossal, mammoth, gigantic2 *outrageous, heinous, atrocious
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
