behemoth

Valid in Scrabble

Scrabble points
18
Words With Friends
18
Letters
8
Pronunciation
/bəˈhi(ː).məθ/
See all 2 pronunciations
/bəˈhi(ː).məθ/ · /ˈbiː.əˌməθ/

Definition of behemoth

3 senses · 1 part of speech · etymology included

noun

  1. A great and mighty beast which God shows to Job in Job 40:15–24.
    “⸿ Beholde now Behemoth which I made with thee, hee eateth graſſe as an oxe. Loe now, his ſtrength is in his loynes, and his force is in the nauell of his belly. Hee moueth his taile like a Cedar: the ſinewes of his ſtones are wrapt together. His bones are as ſtrong pieces of braſſe: his bones are like barres of iron.”
See all 3 definitions

noun

  1. A great and mighty beast which God shows to Job in Job 40:15–24.
    “⸿ Beholde now Behemoth which I made with thee, hee eateth graſſe as an oxe. Loe now, his ſtrength is in his loynes, and his force is in the nauell of his belly. Hee moueth his taile like a Cedar: the ſinewes of his ſtones are wrapt together. His bones are as ſtrong pieces of braſſe: his bones are like barres of iron.”
  2. (broadly)Any great and mighty monster.
    “Next she doused the smouldering troll with the contents of the restaurant's fire extinguisher, hoping the icy powder wouldn't revive the sleeping behemoth.”
  3. (figuratively)Something which has the qualities of great power and might, and monstrous proportions.
    “The diehards who did turn out were at least rewarded with a first sight of Jon Parkin, the behemoth striker signed from Preston, who scored a stunning goal on his debut at Norwich last weekend.”
    “The wide access corridors passed slowly, the conduits and pipes like the circulatory system of some vast planetary behemoth.”
    “We are the workers who built Alphabet. We write code, clean offices, serve food, drive buses, test self-driving cars and do everything needed to keep this behemoth running.”
    “Hiei now loomed into the action, causing the leading U.S. destroyers to scatter before the oncoming behemoth lest they be run down.”
    “The phrase, “tank meta”, is one that carries a lot of weight when it comes to MOBAs. These metas are generally characterized by tanky, unkillable behemoths dominating the meta and leaving any character that isn’t focused around raw DPS in the dust.”

Definitions from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA.

Etymology

From Middle English behemoth, bemoth, from Late Latin behemoth, from Hebrew בְּהֵמוֹת (behemót). Most likely, the Hebrew word is an intensive plural of בְּהֵמָה (behemá, “beast”), from Proto-Semitic (compare Ge'ez…

See full etymology

From Middle English behemoth, bemoth, from Late Latin behemoth, from Hebrew בְּהֵמוֹת (behemót). Most likely, the Hebrew word is an intensive plural of בְּהֵמָה (behemá, “beast”), from Proto-Semitic (compare Ge'ez ብህመ (bəhmä, “to be dumb, to be speechless”), Arabic ب ه م (b h m)). Some have instead suggested a borrowing from a hypothetical Egyptian pA-i-H-E1-mw (*pꜣ-jḥ-mw, “hippopotamus”, literally “the ox of the water”), from pꜣ (“definite article”) + jḥ (“ox, cattle”) + mw (“water”) in a direct genitive construction (for the pronunciation, compare the later Coptic descendants ⲡ- (p-) + ⲉϩⲉ (ehe) + ⲙⲟⲟⲩ (moou)); this, however, suffers from problems such as the lack of attestation of the supposed etymon, and there seems little reason to prefer it to the intensive plural explanation.

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