Colossus
/kəˈlɒsəs/noun
A statue of enormous size, or a person or thing of overwhelming importance.
The Greek roots
Literally: “great statue”
The story of the word
κολοσσός is not originally a Greek word and probably came in from the pre-Greek Aegean; Herodotus uses it for the huge stone figures he saw in Egypt. The Colossus of Rhodes, a bronze Helios some thirty metres tall, stood for barely fifty years before an earthquake brought it down around 226 BC, and it lay in pieces for eight centuries as a tourist attraction. The Colosseum in Rome took its nickname not from its own size but from a colossal statue of Nero that once stood beside it.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
The company was the colossus of the industry for a decade, then lost half its market in two years.