Encyclopedic describes knowledge that is extremely broad and comprehensive, covering many different subjects in great detail. Someone with encyclopedic knowledge of baseball knows the current players and teams, the entire history of the sport, famous games from decades ago, obscure rules, stadium details, and countless statistics. Their knowledge resembles what you'd find in an actual encyclopedia.

The word comes from “encyclopedia,” those thick reference books (or websites) that contain information about thousands of topics. When you call someone's knowledge encyclopedic, you're saying they know so much about something that they could almost write an encyclopedia about it themselves.

You might read that a historian has encyclopedic knowledge of the Civil War, or that your friend has an encyclopedic memory for movie trivia. The word suggests both breadth (knowing about many aspects) and depth (knowing details most people would never remember). It's impressive but also sometimes overwhelming: an encyclopedic lecture might cover so many facts that it's hard to absorb them all.

It captures wide-ranging knowledge that spans an entire field or many fields.