Jumbo means extremely large or oversized. A jumbo jet carries hundreds of passengers across oceans. A jumbo shrimp seems like a contradiction (how can a shrimp be huge?) but it just means the shrimp are bigger than normal. At the grocery store, you might see jumbo eggs, which are larger than medium or large eggs.

The word comes from Jumbo, a famous elephant in the 1800s who stood over 11 feet tall and amazed audiences across America and Europe. He was so enormous that his name became synonymous with anything unusually big.

Today, jumbo appears everywhere: jumbo loans (very large mortgages), jumbo screens in movie theaters, and jumbo packs of snacks. The word adds a sense of impressive, almost exciting bigness. When something is described as jumbo, it's noticeably, remarkably bigger than what you'd normally expect.