‘Huge’ Is Massive

By Ben Yagoda. It’s a venerable word, dating from Middle English and in currency ever since. Thomas More’s Dialogue of Comfort (1535) has the line, “Howe wonderfull houge and greate those spiritual heauenly Ioyes [joys] are.” Translating Homer in 1791, William Cowper wrote, “So moved huge Ajax to the fight.” But huge has been on a roll the last several decades. You can discern that from a nifty Times tool called Chronicle; a la Google Ngram Viewer, you can type in any word or phrase and see frequency of use in the newspaper’s pages over the years. More...