A behemoth is something enormous and powerful, often impressively so. The word originally comes from a mysterious giant creature described in the Bible's Book of Job, but today it describes anything massive that seems to dominate by sheer size.

You might call a cruise ship a behemoth of the seas when you see it towering over the harbor, dwarfing every other boat. A major corporation like Amazon or Google might be called a corporate behemoth because of its huge size and influence. When a football player is described as a behemoth, he's massive and powerful in a way that seems almost overwhelming.

The word carries a sense of awe. A behemoth isn't just large, it's impressively, sometimes intimidatingly, so. A monster truck crushing cars at a rally is a behemoth. A construction crane lifting steel beams dozens of stories high is a behemoth. Even a complicated new assignment with hundreds of pages could be called a behemoth of a project.

While behemoth can describe anything huge, it works best for things that combine great size with power or complexity, things that make you stop and think, “Wow, that's massive.”