Building a Better Vocabulary

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it to capable: “Something that is capacious is capable of holding a
lot; it’s spacious.”

Juggernaut (noun)


An overwhelming or unstoppable force that smashes everything in its path.

z Juggernaut is a Hobson-Jobson of Jagannath, the name of one of
the incarnations of the Hindu god Krishna. In Sanskrit, jagat means
“world or universe,” and natha means “lord.” Thus, Jagannath is
the lord of the world.

z The English word juggernaut dates back to the 1630s and originally
referred to the huge wagons that devotees would pull through the
streets during the Rath Yatra, an annual chariot procession in the
town of Puri in India. An early European account of the festival
claimed that Hindus threw themselves beneath the wheels of the
wagons. Though this is unlikely, it led to the word’s two meanings
in English: the older sense of “something that demands blind
GHYRWLRQRUVDFUL¿FH ́DQGWKHPRUHFRPPRQPRGHUQVHQVHRI³DQ
unstoppable force.”

z The term +REVRQ-REVRQ refers to the law of Hobson-Jobson, which
states that loanwords are always phonetically adapted to suit the
phonology of the language borrowing them. Both the principle and
the term come from a book called +REVRQ-REVRQ$*ORVVDU\RI
Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms,
(W\PRORJLFDO+LVWRULFDO*HRJUDSKLFDODQG'LVFXUVLYH, published
LQ,QVKRUW%ULWVKDGGLI¿FXOW\SURQRXQFLQJJagannath; thus,
when they borrowed the name to use metaphorically, it morphed
into the more English-friendly juggernaut.


  1. What two words, respectively meaning “large” and “small,” were given
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