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Enormity vs Huge - What's the difference?

enormity | huge |

As a noun enormity

is (uncountable) extreme wickedness, nefariousness.

As an adjective huge is

very large.

enormity

English

Noun

(enormities)
  • (uncountable) Extreme wickedness, nefariousness.
  • Not until the war ended and journalists were able to enter Cambodia did the world really become aware of the enormity of Pol Pot's oppression.
  • (countable) An act of extreme evil or wickedness.
  • (uncountable) Hugeness, enormousness, immenseness.
  • * {{quote-news
  • , year=2012 , date=May 13 , author=Alistair Magowan , title=Sunderland 0-1 Man Utd , work=BBC Sport citation , page= , passage=Rooney and his team-mates started ponderously, as if sensing the enormity of the occasion, but once Scholes began to link with Ryan Giggs in the middle of the park, the visitors increased the tempo with Sunderland struggling to keep up.}}
  • * 2007 , Edwin Mullins, The Popes of Avignon , Blue Bridge 2008, p. 103:
  • But the enormity of Clement's vision of papal grandeur only became clear once the public rooms were completed during the years that immediately followed.

    Usage notes

    * Enormity'' is frequently used as a synonym for "enormousness," rather than "great wickedness." This is frequently considered an error; the words have different roots in French, and radically different accepted meanings, although both trace back to the same Latin source word, ''enormis , meaning "deviating from the norm, abnormal."

    huge

    English

    Adjective

    (er)
  • Very large.
  • :
  • *
  • *:“I don't mean all of your friends—only a small proportion—which, however, connects your circle with that deadly, idle, brainless bunch—the insolent chatterers at the opera,the neurotic victims of mental cirrhosis, the jewelled animals whose moral code is the code of the barnyard—!”
  • *{{quote-book, year=1963, author=(Margery Allingham)
  • , title=(The China Governess), chapter=1 citation , passage=The huge square box, parquet-floored and high-ceilinged, had been arranged to display a suite of bedroom furniture designed and made in the halcyon days of the last quarter of the nineteenth century,
  • *{{quote-magazine, date=2013-07-20, volume=408, issue=8845, magazine=(The Economist)
  • , title= Out of the gloom , passage=[Rural solar plant] schemes are of little help to industry or other heavy users of electricity. Nor is solar power yet as cheap as the grid. For all that, the rapid arrival of electric light to Indian villages is long overdue. When the national grid suffers its next huge outage, as it did in July 2012 when hundreds of millions were left in the dark, look for specks of light in the villages.}}
  • (lb) Distinctly interesting, significant, important, likeable, well regarded.
  • :
  • Synonyms

    * (very large) colossal, enormous, giant, gigantic, immense, prodigious, vast * See also

    Antonyms

    * (very large) tiny, small, minuscule,

    Derived terms

    * hugely * hugeness * hugeous * superhuge