Lilliputian has come to refer to anything small or trivial. The word houyhnhnm echoes the neighing of a horse. They're endowed with reason - some say too much reason - and rule over the brutish Yahoos. The houyhnhnm are a race of noble and intelligent horses that Gulliver encounters in the last part of Gulliver's Travels. "The word Houyhnhnm, in their Tongue, signifies a Horse, and in its Etymology, the Perfection of Nature." The country is said to be "a continent-sized peninsula six thousand miles long and three thousand miles wide," although a "map shows Brobdingnag to be of a similar size and extent as the present-day Washington."īrobdingnag gained the figurative meaning of anything immense or gigantic around 1731, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
"If this treatise should happen to be translated into the language of Brobdingnag (which is the general name of that kingdom,) and transmitted thither, the king and his people would have reason to complain that I had done them an injury by a false and diminutive representation."īrobdingnag is the land of giants in Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
However, he had no problem inventing words himself, as evinced by our eight favorites here. Swift was also a proponent for " correcting" English as much as possible and hated "invented" words such as banter, mob, and bamboozle.
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