For this week's "Word of the Week"*, here's one I encountered a few days ago, while reading A Monstrous Regiment of Women (by Laurie R. King):
I recognized it, knew it's meaning, and even knew it was from Gulliver's Travels (by Johnathan Swift), but not the details. According to Merriam-Webster, "Brobdingnagian" (always capitalized) means "marked by tremendous size". It comes from the land of Brobdingnag, peopled by giants and (again from Merriam-Webster), within two years of the novel's publication, "Brobdingnagian" was being used to mean something enormous or gigantic. I've never used it -- it's a mouthful -- but might try incorporating it in writing some point in the future.
As a bonus, here's another word of interest from the past week: heirloom. Now what, you might ask, could be interesting about such a common word? I wanted to know something about it from long before it became a legal term: what "loom" referred to in heirloom. I checked the etymology and, apparently (according to various sources), before it meant a specific machine, the word "loom" (a shortened form of the Old English word "geloma" meaning tool or utensil) meant a tool in general, though in it's broader, original meaning, it could be any item or article. Hence, an heirloom could be as humble as the tool of the trade of one's father. It may not be interesting to anyone else, but I found it to be so.
*"Word of the Week" is a meme hosted by the Plain-Spoken Pen on Mondays in which we share a word that we find entertaining, enlightening, edifying, or just plain fun to say!
