awesome
awe·some
adjective
inspiring awe or admiration or wonder
- “New York is an amazing city”
- “the Grand Canyon is an awe-inspiring sight”
- “the awesome complexity of the universe”
- “this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath” Melville
- “Westminster Hall”
Origin
From awe + -some; compare earlier awful and Middle English eiful (“inducing fright or terror, terrible”), from Old English eġeful (“fearful; inspiring awe”). The oldest meaning of awesome is of “something which inspires awe”, but the word is now also a common colloquial expression. It was originally so used in the United States, where it had featured strikingly in the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora!, as used by Japan's Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto to describe the "awesome" industrial potential of the United States. Consequently, as the word popularly became an expression for anything superb, in its original meaning it has tended to be replaced by the related word, awe-inspiring.
Phrases
- awesome sauce
WordNet 2.1 (Princeton University). Wiktionary (CC BY-SA). CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. WordNet 2.1 Copyright Princeton University. All rights reserved. Wiktionary content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence.