- 1巨人；巨像（如「羅德島巨像」）
A colossus is someone or something extremely big, or extremely important — a giant. The first famous one was a huge bronze statue of the sun god at the harbour of Rhodes in ancient Greece; people still call it the Colossus of Rhodes. From that statue the word spread. A company can be a colossus if it towers over its industry. A writer or a scientist can be a colossus if their work feels larger than everyone else’s. Though actually, in everyday talk it is a slightly grand, newspaper-style word. You would not call a tall a colossus unless you were joking. The usual plurals are colossi (from Latin) and colossuses; both appear.
組成From Latin colossus, from Ancient Greek κολοσσός (kolossós), a large statue, especially the Colossus of Rhodes. The Greek word itself is from an older language before Greek that we cannot name. People once wrongly linked it to a Greek word for a summit.
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
colossusnoun/kəˈlɒs.əs/
- 1
A statue of gigantic size. The name was especially applied to certain famous statues in antiquity, as the Colossus of Nero in Rome and the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
- 2
Any creature or thing of gigantic size.
- ["]The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. […] Why, they don't even understand their own colossi any longer. The machines work from generation to generation automatically, and the caretakers are a hereditary caste who would be helpless if a single D-tube in all that vast structure burnt out.["]
- What I love about the colossi is that they actually feel colossal : they move ponderously around, sending out tremours with each step; their ancient husks richly detailed with dirt and plant life.
- 3
Somebody or something very greatly admired and respected.
- The truth is that [Isaac] Newton was very much a product of his time. The colossus of science was not the first king of reason, [John Maynard] Keynes wrote after reading Newton’s unpublished manuscripts. Instead “he was the last of the magicians”.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。