Other forms: behemoths
A behemoth is something enormously large and powerful. A corporate behemoth.
It is used of companies and of machines rather than of people. The word comes from a creature in the book of Job, and the Hebrew is a plural used for emphasis.
1nounbehemothSomething enormously large and powerful.
“The behemoth in the corner of the yard was a printing press.”
behemoth is a thing.
Hebrew behemoth is an intensive plural of behemah, a beast, and names a creature in the book of Job.
Hebrew
בְּהֵמוֹת
Latin
behemoth
Middle English
behemoth,bemoth
English, today
behemoth
Built from
From Middle English behemoth,bemoth, from Latin behemoth, from Hebrew בְּהֵמוֹת. Most likely, the Hebrew word is an intensive plural of בְּהֵמָה (“beast”), from Proto-Semitic - (compare gez ብህመ (“to be dumb, to be speechless”), Arabic ب ه م). Some have instead suggested a borrowing from a hypothetical egy 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- + ⲉϩⲉ + ⲙⲟⲟⲩ); 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.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA