When I walked into the MHC Heritage Museum, where I’m executive director, my entry startled Davis Scott, the host of the day. He was around the corner, looking through the dictionary.
“Is ‘humongous’ a real word?” he asked.
“Of course it is,” I said.
“I used it in a sentence, and my friend told me it wasn’t a word,” he replied. He had been telling her how he and his friends Dylan Chappell and David Bowyer had just moved a humongous piano from Lynchburg to his house.
He was running his finger down the column of words that start with “hum.” Despite checking two or three times, we didn’t come up with any words between “humulus” and “humus” (We thought it had a second “u”).
“That can’t be,” I said. “Lemme look it up online.” I typed into my phone and, much to my surprise I had spelled it wrong. (I, whose only school days glories ever were Spelling Bee and the “Most Books Read” prizes each year, should have known better.)
We tried again, this time searching for “humungous.”
Nothing.
How could that be? I’ve known that word all my life.
We were looking through the unabridged Webster’s dictionary my mother gave me for my college graduation, published in 1993.
“Look it up online on Merriam-Webster!” I exclaimed, and we both dashed to the desk, sat down and searched. Each edition of a dictionary is updated beyond previous editions with new words that had come into use since the previous dictionary. “Humongous” must be a relatively new word. The dynamic online Merriam-Webster is updated on a regular basis, and anyway, it is more than 3 decades newer than the unabridged dictionary which, by the way, is on display on a dictionary stand in the museum as part of an exhibit on local media.
There, we found it listed. Our comments spilled over each other’s as we read on down the entry, learning new information about the word we had taken for granted:
- Its etymology (where the word come from) is listed as “perhaps alteration of ‘huge’ + ‘monstrous.’
- The first known use of “humongous” was in 1964 – That does make it a new word!
Merriam-Webster also has a link to look up other words that first made the dictionary in a certain year. That list makes a fun look back at the culture of the time. In fact, looking at that list is one of many ways to learn about history. (I enjoy the history of culture, community, words and languages.)
Here are just some of the words that first made the dictionary in 1964. Imagine a world when these concepts were new:
- Black hole
- Body stocking (oh la la)
- Bradford pear (don’t people wish that monstrosity of a Frankenstein never had been invented. Apparently, this was the year.)
- Choke hold
- Computerist (a word I’ve never heard of before; they probably thought it would really take off, but it never did)
- Condo
- Dine-in (If people from the 1960s could only see what take-out is now)
- Drink-driving (that’s right, not “drunk-driving,” in the 1960s)
- Garage sale
- Gender identity
- Gentrification
- Grandparenting
- Graphic novel
- Gun control
- Gun rights (Of course, the two “gun” ones had to balance each other out.)
- Homophobia
- Identity theft (If they only could imagine how it’s done now …)
- Mack daddy
- Pre-cooked (If they only could imagine how common pre-cooked would be and how rare home-cooked would be.)
- Rat fink
- Reverse discrimination
- Rug rat
- Skinny dip (those ’60s were wild, weren’t they?)
- Streaking (ditto)
- Talking head
- White savior
- Worst-case
Those words on my list are only about 10% of the ones on Merriam-Webster’s list of 1964 words. Most of them are not at all in common use, and some, such as “videodisc,” probably seemed needed at the time but did not pick up in usage or became obsolete.
To finish us off: Merriam-Webster conveniently provides a copy-paste entry citation, and it would be inconsiderate of me not to use it: “Humongous.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humongous. Accessed 28 Jan. 2025.
